the same class with those that settled in the great valleys
of Pennsylvania, and who have made so large a portion of that State into
a rich ingrain-carpet of cultivation upon a floor of limestone. One day
the history of the Germans of Pennsylvania and Virginia will be written,
and it will be full of interest and value. They were the first strong
sinews strung in the industrial arm of the Colonies to which they came;
and although mingled with nearly every European race, they remain to
this day a distinct people. A partition-wall rarely broken down has
always inclosed them, and to this, perhaps, is due that slowness of
progress which marks them. The restless ambition of _Le Grand Monarque_
and the cruelties of Turenne converted the beautiful valley of the Rhine
into a smoking desert, and the wretched peasantry of the Palatinate fled
from their desolated firesides to seek a more hospitable home in the
forests of New York and Pennsylvania, and thence, somewhat later,
found their way into Virginia. The exodus of the Puritans has had more
celebrity, but was scarcely attended with more hardship and heroism. The
greater part of the German exiles landed in America stripped of their
all. They came to the forests of the Susquehanna and the Shenandoah
armed only with the woodman's axe. They were ignorant and superstitious,
and brought with them the legends of their fatherland. The spirits
of the Hartz Mountains and the genii of the Black Forest, which
Christianity had not been able entirely to exorcise, were transferred to
the wild mountains and dark caverns of the Old Dominion, and the same
unearthly visitants which haunted the old castles of the Rhine continued
their gambols in some deserted cabin on the banks of the Sherandah (as
the Shenandoah was then called). Since these men left their fatherland,
a great Literature and Philosophy have breathed like a tropic upon that
land, and the superstitions have been wrought into poetry and thought;
but that raw material of legend which in Germany has been woven into
finest tissues on the brain-looms of Wieland, Tieck, Schiller, and
Goethe, has remained raw material in the great valley that stretches
from New York to Upper Alabama. Whole communities are found which in
manners and customs are much the same with their ancestors who crossed
the ocean. The horseshoe is still nailed above the door as a protection
against the troublesome spook, and the black art is still practised.
Rough in thei