fires, and filled with human activities.
Every Border keep is a home: brides are taken there in their blushes;
children are born there; gray men, the crucifix held over them, die
there. The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss-troopers, by
secret and desert paths, ride over into England to lift a prey, and the
bale-fire on the hill gives the alarm to Cumberland. Men live and marry,
and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket and spear; and the
Flower of Yarrow, when her larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in her
husband's platter. A time of strife and foray, of plundering and
burning, of stealing and reaving; when hate waits half a lifetime for
revenge, and where difficulties are solved by the slash of a sword-blade.
I open the German book, and find a warfare conducted in a different
manner. Here the Devil rides about wasting and destroying. Here
temptations lie in wait for the soul; here pleasures, like glittering
meteors, lure it into marshes and abysses. Watch and ward are kept here,
and to sleep at the post is death. Fortresses are built on the rock of
God's promises--inaccessible to the arrows of the wicked,--and therein
dwell many trembling souls. Conflict rages around, not conducted by
Border spear on barren moorland, but by weapons of faith and prayer in
the devout German heart;--a strife earnest as the other, with issues of
life and death. And the resemblance between the books lies in this, that
when we open them these past experiences and conditions of life gleam
visibly to us far down like submerged cities--all empty and hollow now,
though once filled with life as real as our own--through transparent
waters.

In glancing over these German hymns, one is struck by their adaptation to
the seasons and occurrences of ordinary life. Obviously, too, the
writer's religion was not a Sunday matter only, it had its place in
week-days as well. In these hymns there is little gloom, a healthy human
cheerfulness pervades many of them, and this is surely as it ought to be.
These hymns, as I have said, are adapted to the occasions of ordinary
life; and this speaks favourably of the piety which produced them. I do
not suppose that we English are less religious than other nations, but we
are undemonstrative in this, as in most things. We have the sincerest
horror of over-dressing ourselves in fine sentiments. We are a little
shy of religion. We give it a day entirely to itself, and make it a
stra