23. We will call this, in future, the chain, or company, of the [Pg 36] Enchanted mountains; and then we shall all the more easily join on the Giant mountains, Riesen-Gebirge, when we want them; but these are altogether higher, sterner, and not yet to be invaded; the nearer ones, through which our road lies, we might perhaps more aptly call the Goblin mountains; but that would be scarcely reverent to St. Elizabeth, nor to the numberless pretty chatelaines of towers, and princesses of park and glen, who have made German domestic manners sweet and exemplary, and have led their lightly rippling and translucent lives down the glens of ages, until enchantment becomes, perhaps, too canonical in the Almanach de Gotha.
We will call them therefore the Enchanted Mountains, not the Goblin; perceiving gratefully also that the Rock spirits of them have really much more of the temper of fairy physicians than of gnomes: each—as it were with sensitive hazel wand instead of smiting rod—beckoning, out of sparry caves, effervescent Brunnen, beneficently salt and warm.
24. At the very heart of this Enchanted chain, then—(and the beneficentest, if one use it and guide it rightly, of all the Brunnen there,) sprang the fountain of the earliest Frank race; "in the principality of Waldeck,"—you can trace their current to no farther source; there it rises out of the earth.
'Frankenberg' (Burg), on right bank of the Eder, nineteen miles north of Marburg, you may find marked clearly in the map No. 18 of Black's General Atlas, wherein the cluster of surrounding bewitched mountains, and the valley of Eder-stream otherwise (as the village higher up the dell still calls itself) "Engel-Bach," "Angel Brook," joining that of the Fulda, just above Cassel, are also delineated in a way intelligible to attentive mortal eyes. I should be plagued with the names in trying a woodcut; but a few careful pen-strokes, or wriggles, of your own off-hand touching, would give you the concurrence of the actual sources of Weser in a comfortably extricated form, with the memorable towns on them, or just south of them, on the other slope of the watershed, towards Maine. Frankenberg and Waldeck on Eder, Fulda and Cassel on Fulda, Eisenach on Werra, who accentuates himself into Weser after taking Fulda for bride, as Tees the Greta, beyond [Pg 37] Eisenach, under the Wartzburg, (of which you have heard as a castle employed on Christian mission and Bible Society purposes), town-streets below hard paved with basalt—name of it, Iron-ach, significant of Thuringian armouries in the old time,—it is active with mills for many things yet.
25. The rocks all the way from Rhine, thus far, are jets and spurts of basalt through irony sandstone, with a strip of coal or two northward, by the grace of God not worth digging for; at Frankenberg even a gold mine; also, by Heaven's mercy, poor of its ore; but wood and iron always to be had for the due trouble; and, of softer wealth above ground,—game, corn, fruit, flax, wine, wool, and hemp! Monastic care over all, in Fulda's and Walter's houses—which I find marked by a cross as built by some pious Walter, Knight of Meiningen on the Boden wasser, Bottom water, as of water having found its way well down at last: so "Boden-See," of Rhine well got down out of Via Mala.
26. And thus, having got your springs of Weser clear from the rock; and, as it were, gathered up the reins of your river, you can draw for yourself, easily enough, the course of its farther stream, flowing virtually straight north, to the North Sea. And mark it strongly on your sketched map of Europe, next to the border Vistula, leaving out Elbe yet for a time. For now, you may take the whole space between Weser and Vistula (north of the mountains), as wild barbarian (Saxon or Goth); but, piercing the source of the Franks at Waldeck, you will find them gradually, but swiftly, filling all the space between Weser and the mouths of Rhine, passing from mountain foam into calmer diffusion over the Netherland, where their straying forest and pastoral life has at last to embank itself into muddy agriculture, and in bleak-flying sea mist, forget the sunshine on its basalt crags.
27. Whereupon, we must also pause, to embank ourselves somewhat; and before other things, try what we can understand in this name of Frank, concerning which Gibbon tells us, in his sweetest tones of satisfied moral serenity—"The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these [Pg 38] Germans. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained, the honourable epithet of Franks, or Freemen." He does not, however, tell us in what language of the time—Chaucian, Sicambrian, Chamavian, or Cattian,—'Frank' ever meant Free: nor can I find out myself what tongue of any time it first belongs to; but I doubt not that Miss Yonge ('History of Christian Names,' Articles on Frey and Frank), gives the true root, in what she calls the High German "Frang," Free Lord. Not by any means a Free Commoner, or anything of the sort! but a person whose nature and name implied the existence around him, and beneath, of a considerable number of other persons who were by no means 'Frang,' nor Frangs. His title is one of the proudest then maintainable;—ratified at last by the dignity of age added to that of valour, into the Seigneur, or Monseigneur, not even yet in the last cockney form of it, 'Mossoo,' wholly understood as a republican term!
28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances only with the flat side of it into any meaning of 'Libre,' but with all its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave, strong, and honest, above other men. [2-6] The old woodland race were never in any wolfish sense 'free,' but in a most human sense [Pg 39] Frank, outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and restless always;—but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian, and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to Servitude,—but to Shyness! [2-7] It is to this day the note of the sweetest and Frenchiest of French character, that it makes simply perfect Servants. Unwearied in protective friendship, in meekly dextrous omnificence, in latent tutorship; the lovingly availablest of valets,—the mentally and personally bonniest of bonnes. But in no capacity shy of you! Though you be the Duke or Duchess of Montaltissimo, you will not find them abashed at your altitude. They will speak 'up' to you, when they have a mind.
29. Best of servants: best of subjects, also, when they have an [Pg 40] equally frank King, or Count, or Captal, to lead them; of which we shall see proof enough in due time;—but, instantly, note this farther, that, whatever side-gleam of the thing they afterwards called Liberty may be meant by the Frank name, you must at once now, and always in future, guard yourself from confusing their Liberties with their Activities. What the temper of the army may be towards its chief, is one question—whether either chief or army can be kept six months quiet,—another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood—tense, and tension;—which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always bright, and on, and would ever choose rather to ride fasting than sit feasting,—this childlike dread of being put in a corner, and continual want of something to do, is to be watched by us with wondering sympathy in all its sometimes splendid, but too often unlucky or disastrous consequences to the nation itself as well as to its neighbours.
30. And this activity, which we stolid beef-eaters, before we had been taught by modern science that we were no better than baboons ourselves, were wont discourteously to liken to that of the livelier tribes of Monkey, did in fact so much impress the Hollanders, when first the irriguous Franks gave motion and current to their marshes, that the earliest heraldry in which we find the Frank power blazoned seems to be founded on a Dutch endeavour to give some distantly satirical presentment of it. "For," says a most ingenious historian, Mons. André Favine,—'Parisian, and Advocate in the High Court of the French Parliament in the year 1620'—"those people who bordered on the river Sala, called 'Salts,' by the Allemaignes, were on their descent into Dutch lands called by the Romans 'Franci Salici'" (whence 'Salique' law to come, you observe) "and by abridgment 'Salii,' as if of the verb 'salire,' that is to say 'saulter,' to leap"—(and in [Pg 41] future therefore—duly also to dance—in an incomparable manner) "to be quicke and nimble of foot, to leap and mount well, a quality most notably requisite for such as dwell in watrie and marshy places; So that while such of the French as dwelt on the great course of the river" (Rhine) "were called 'Nageurs,' Swimmers, they of the marshes were called 'Saulteurs,' Leapers, so that it was a nickname given to the French in regard both of their natural disposition and of their dwelling; as, yet to this day, their enemies call them French Toades, (or Frogs, more properly) from whence grew the fable that their ancient Kings carried such creatures in their Armes."