ble; to this
day the inner main-lands little changed for good[12]--and their
inhabitants now fallen even on sadder times.

[Footnote 12: See generally any description that Carlyle has had
occasion to give of Prussian or Polish ground, or edge of Baltic
shore.]

11. For in the fifth century they had herds of cattle[13] to drive and
kill, unpreserved hunting-grounds full of game and wild deer, tameable
reindeer also then, even so far in the south; spirited hogs, good for
practice of fight as in Meleager's time, and afterwards for bacon;
furry creatures innumerable, all good for meat or skin. Fish of the
infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant
in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own
riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the
oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious
Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black
lake of Colchos on the south.

[Footnote 13: Gigantic--and not yet fossilized! See Gibbon's note on
the death of Theodebert: "The King pointed his spear--the Bull
_overturned a tree on his head_,--he died the same day."--vii. 255.
The Horn of Uri and her shield, with the chiefly towering crests of
the German helm, attest the terror of these Aurochs herds.]

12. And they were, to all outward aspect, and in all _felt_ force, the
living powers of the world, in that long hour of its transfiguration.
All else known once for awful, had become formalism, folly, or
shame:--the Roman armies, a mere sworded mechanism, fast falling
confused, every sword against its fellow;--the Roman civil multitude,
mixed of slaves, slave-masters, and harlots; the East, cut off from
Europe by the intervening weakness of the Greek. These starving troops
of the Black forests and White seas, themselves half wolf, half
drift-wood, (as _we_ once called ourselves Lion-hearts, and
Oak-hearts, so they), merciless as the herded hound, enduring as the
wild birch-tree and pine. You will hear of few beside them for five
centuries yet to come: Visigoths, west of Vistula;--Ostrogoths, east
of Vistula; radiant round little Holy Island (Heligoland), our own
Saxons, and Hamlet the Dane, and his foe the sledded Polack on the
ice,--all these south of Baltic; and pouring _across_ Baltic,
constantly, her mountain-ministered strength, Scandinavia, until at
last _she_ for a time rules all, and the Norman name is of disputeless