ature under the traditional form. In such a way every young
nation tries to represent life, and among the Germans, this
inclination, together with the love of mystery, worked most powerfully
in the same direction. It gave much opportunity for dramatic acting,
though it was a peculiarly undramatic period in the life of the people,
for words and characteristic gestures do not flow from the inward man;
they come with imposing power from external circumstances, leading,
forming, and restraining the individual.

Such union of order and discipline belongs to the epic time of the
people.

How the German mind outgrew these bonds we shall learn from the
following stories of the olden time. In the course of four centuries
the great change was accomplished--a powerful action of the mind
brought freedom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a fearful
political catastrophe brought destruction in the seventeenth.[3] After
a long deathlike sleep the modern spirit of the people awoke in the
eighteenth century.

PICTURES OF GERMAN LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

SCENES FROM THE HUSSITE WAR.
(about 1425.)

Among the events of the thirteenth century, the wonderfully rapid
colonization of the Sclave country east of the Elbe has never been
sufficiently appreciated. In the course of one century a numerous body
of German emigrants of all classes, almost as many as now go to
America, spread themselves over a large tract of country, established
hundreds of cities and villages, and united it for the most part firmly
to Germany. Nearly the whole of the eastern part of Prussia extends
over a portion of the territory that was thus colonized.

The time however of this outpouring of national strength was not the
heroic period of Germany. The enthusiasm of the Crusades, the splendour
of the Hohenstaufen, the short reign of German chivalry, and the
greatest elevation of German art, were at the end of the twelfth and
beginning of the thirteenth century, whereas the colonization of the
Sclave frontier was carried on with most energy towards the close of
it. This was the period when Neumark and Prussia were conquered, and
Lausitz, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Rugen, and Silesia colonized. But
there was a striking difference in the case of Silesia; for whilst in
the other Sclave countries the people were crushed by the iron hand of
the c