swift
spear from the northernmost promontory of Jutland into the German Ocean to
mark the true frontier of his empire, to the day when Christian IX. put
his unwilling pen to that Danish constitution which was to incorporate all
the country north of the Eider with Denmark, they have had to share in all
the triumphs and all the humiliations of the German race, to which they
are linked by the strong ties of a common blood and a common language.

Such constant trials and vicissitudes have told on the character of these
German borderers, and have made them what they are, a hardy and
determined, yet careful and cautious race. Their constant watchings and
struggles against the slow encroachments or sudden inroads of an enemy
more inveterate even than the Danes,--namely, the sea,--had imparted to them
from the earliest times somewhat of that wariness and perseverance which
we perceive in the national character of the Dutch and the Venetians. But
the fresh breezes of the German Ocean and the Baltic kept their nerves
well braced and their hearts buoyant; and for muscular development the
arms of these sturdy ploughers of the sea and the land can vie with those
of any of their neighbors on the isles or on the Continent.
_Holsten-treue_, _i.e._ Holstein-truth, is proverbial throughout Germany,
and it has stood the test of long and fearful trials.

There is but one way of gaining an insight into the real character of a
people, unless we can actually live among them for years; and that is to
examine their language and literature. Now it is true that the language
spoken in Schleswig-Holstein is not German,--at least not in the ordinary
sense of the word,--and one may well understand how travellers and
correspondents of newspapers, who have picked up their German phrases from
Ollendorf, and who, on the strength of this, try to enter into a
conversation with Holstein peasants, should arrive at the conclusion that
these peasants speak Danish, or, at all events, that they do not speak
German.

The Germans of Schleswig-Holstein are Saxons, and all true Saxons speak
Low-German, and Low-German is more different from High-German than English
is from Lowland Scotch. Low-German, however, is not to be mistaken for
vulgar German. It is the German which from time immemorial was spoken in
the low countries and along the northern sea-coast of Germany, as opposed
to the German of the high country, of Swabia, Thuringia, Bavaria, and
Austria. These tw