[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 dominion, from the North Cape to Jerusalem.