plenty also of alluvial
mud, grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough"--in all things like
the Saxons, except, as I read the matter, in that 'aversion to be
interfered with' which you modern English think an especially Saxon
character in you,--but which is, on the contrary, you will find on
examination, by no means Saxon; but only Wendisch, Czech, Serbic,
Sclavic,--other hard names I could easily find for it among the tribes
of that vehemently heathen old Preussen--"resolutely worshipful
of places of oak trees, of wooden or stone idols, of Bangputtis,
Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb blocks." Your English
"dislike to be interfered with" is in absolute fellowship with these,
but only gathers itself in its places of Stalks, or chimneys, instead
of oak trees, round its idols of iron, instead of wood, diabolically
_vocal_ now; strident, and sibilant, instead of dumb.

Far other than these, their neighbour Saxons, Jutes and
Angles!--tribes between whom the distinctions are of no moment
whatsoever, except that an English boy or girl may with grace remember
that 'Old England,' exactly and strictly so called, was the small
district in the extreme south of Denmark, totally with its islands
estimable at sixty miles square of dead flat land. Directly south
of it, the definitely so-called Saxons held the western shore of
Holstein, with the estuary of the Elbe, and the sea-mark isle,
Heligoland. But since the principal temple of Saxon worship was close
to Leipsic,[9] we may include under our general term, Saxons, the
inhabitants of the whole level district of North Germany, from the
Gulf of Flensburg to the Hartz; and, eastward, all the country watered
by the Elbe as far as Saxon Switzerland.

[Footnote 9: Turner, vol. i., p. 223.]

Of the character of this race I will not here speak at any length:
only note of it this essential point, that their religion was at
once more practical and more imaginative than that of the Norwegian
peninsula; the Norse religion being the conception rather of natural
than moral powers, but the Saxon, primarily of moral, as the lords
of natural--their central divine image, Irminsul,[10] holding the
standard of peace in her right hand, a balance in her left. Such a
religion may degenerate into mere slaughter and rapine; but it has the
making in it of the noblest men.

[Footnote 10: Properly plural 'Images'--Irminsul and Irminsula.]

More practical at all events, whether for good or evil,