Only, the Nations shall be great and free.”
Wordsworth.
This country has never long needed such a despotism. Germany, too, though hardly yet freed from a political despotism, has through a large portion of its area long thrown off the despotism of Rome, and embraced the more elevating and life-giving doctrines of the Reformation. In those provinces where this blessed change has taken place, Germany is starting rapidly into that career of intellectuality which England commenced three hundred years ago. The Germans and the English are preeminently deep-thinking nations; and in both of them is the Nose more decidedly and more generally of a Cogitative form than in any other Gothic nations.
The Cogitative may therefore, perhaps, be said to be one of the characteristic forms of the Noses of those Gothic branches, and might be expressed thus, (I + II)/III. Nevertheless, various degrees of education and various pursuits, with (in England) free institutions, have so diversified their features that they exhibit a much less uniform character than the features of most other nations.
The Anglo-Americans afford a further corroborative proof that the Cogitative Nose is dependent on the cultivation of a Cogitative mind. They present a striking contrast to their puritan forefathers,—men who abandoned home, country and friends for the sake of religious and political opinions; men to whom conscience was dearer than life, and freedom more precious than worldly advantage; men of the strictest integrity, the most scrupulous honesty, and the sternest firmness, sullied only by an excess of over-wrought feeling—fanaticism. All these virtues, and this vice (itself a virtue gone mad) are wanting to the American character. That there are happy exceptions, it is true; but a nation which boasts smartness as its most prominent virtue, must not complain if it is accused of want of principle. The circumstances of young America have contributed to render hers an unthinking people. The wild life to which so large a portion have been subjected, cut off from all neighbourhood, debarred from communication with cultivated minds, thrown entirely on the active business of the day for mental food, they have necessarily degenerated from the thinking men to whom they are indebted for their origin.
So far from the American Nose inheriting the Cogitative form of their ancestors’, it is thin and sharp; and, as a national nose, the most unthinking of any of the Gothic stock. America is, however, a fast-growing nation; it has had no infancy, but started at once into life, a full-grown youth. There is hope, therefore—of which already some assurance has been given—that it will yet furnish its quota of thinkers to the history of the human mind.
Strange as the assertion may appear, it is susceptible of many proofs, that the now degraded and dwindled Celts were originally the most powerful and widely dispersed people of the earth, boasting simultaneously a geographical extent and political importance, which have been achieved only by successive generations of the Gothic branches of the Indo-Germanic nations.
The Aborigines, Autochthones, Gigantes, Titanides (all which names signify earth-born), Atlantides, Cyclopeans, Pelasgi, Umbri, Etrusci and Sikeli, the Iotuns in Scandinavia, Pali in India, Kaous in Persia, Hycsos in Egypt, may all equally, by plausible and unanswerable facts, be surmised to have been Celts, with whom the immigrators of other races waged continual wars for possession of the earth. All the myths—so universal—of the wars of the gods and the giants, relate to wars between the invading conquerors and the primitive inhabitants, who are everywhere to be traced by their gigantic works of unhewn stone, cromlechs, stone circles, &c., not referable to any historic period, because the conquerors destroyed all records of their architects, and then, in idiotic wonder at their vast dimensions, referred them to gigantic first possessors of the earth.
Whether the original stature of the Celts was greater than that of the Gothic nations, may be doubted; but it is a curious fact that nearly all the modern European giants have been Celts, and immense stature was a common property of the wild Irish of former generations.
The existing Celtic races call for more extended observation. As an un-Gothicized nation, the Irish is the only remnant of a people which probably was at one time thinly spread over the whole of Europe. Nearly related to, if not originally identical with, the Goths, yet naturally of a less vigorous constitution and lower habit of mind, the Celts rapidly gave way before, or irretrievably amalgamated themselves with, their Pelasgian invaders in Greece and Italy, and their Gothic invaders in Trans-Alpine Europe.