These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first translation of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the days when Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the feeling for beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque and poignant features of the historical landscape.
These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare, into compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men, women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now, in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain. The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the Rhine, the Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again, landing on the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and bringing home tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This virile stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished; and in Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for translating the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into painting, building, poetry, and music.
France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory roughly included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder, and the Danube.
As we know these countries to-day, the definite thing about them is their difference. You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem thousands of miles apart. "How did it happen," asks Voltaire, "that, setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?"
One might ask as well how it happened, that the speech of one German invasion mixing itself with Latin became French, of another Spanish, of another Portuguese, of another Italian, of another English. These are interesting inquiries, and in regard to the former it is not difficult to see, that men grew to be governed differently, according as the geographical exigencies of their homes were different, and as they occupied themselves differently.