This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art and Teutonic literature, and even in action. The spirit which originates the Völker-wanderung, for instance, reappears in the half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to the crusades. They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land, where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading, whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the Teutonic race.
And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest epochs. It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth and ninth centuries. It adds the glamour as from a distant and enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the pilgrim's high endeavour. It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners and made the ocean their inheritance. In later times it reappears as the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate, yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its environment.
If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude, already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the coming harmonies, of Faustus and Lear, of Hamlet and Adonais.
[[1]] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name. Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something of the spirit of Arminius, etwas vom Geiste Armins (D.K.I., p. 112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of Waitz (Verfassungsgeschichte, iii, p. 120). Yet the form Widu-kind is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the name.
[[2]] Döllinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable—"Aber er (i.e., Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Mächtigen, ein religiöses Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht, welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich trug:—das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles religiösen Zwanges." Proceeding to expand this idea, Döllinger again describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, dass der Beherrscher eines mächtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkündete, die dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der öffentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen müssen. Die Evangelische Union, welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein früher unbekanntes und für unmöglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen glücklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und vorbereitenden Gründer betrachten."—Akademische Vorträge, 1891, vol. iii, pp. 55, 56.
[[3]] The Argenis was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria. In the motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and requires no other. The Argenis, unfortunately for English literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.