Lakes, rivers, and springs, were held in special veneration; and Petrarch relates, that even in the fourteenth century the women at Cologne bathed in the Rhine to wash away their sins.
Strangely in their natures were intermixed the gentle and the savage, the cruel and the terrible, with the honourable and brave. Side by side we find human sacrifices and a festival in honour of the first violet; men who had been mutilated, and sickly children were sunk in morasses, or otherwise destroyed; and we find them with a pure love for woman, whom they held in the highest reverence. Their women were brought up in the strictest seclusion, scarcely seeing any stranger,—an injury offered to female modesty was punished by death, and fines for injuries done to them were heavier than for those to men.
Maidens were portionless, so only married for their merits or their beauty: they seldom married before their twentieth year, and the husband had generally reached his thirtieth; they had but one husband, and the historian Tacitus observes, speaking of them, “as she can have but one body and one life, so she can have but one husband.”
Prophetesses were frequent, and great confidence placed in their predictions,—they were called Alrunæ, and lived apart in the recesses of the forests.
They had many ways of interpreting the will of the gods, but of all interpreters the horse was considered the most sacred; white horses were peculiarly venerated, and maintained at the expense of the community, expressly to interpret the divine will,—even the priests themselves considered that they were but the ministers, while the horses were the confidants of the gods.
The priests, as in all semi-barbarous countries, were the real governors of these uncurbed Germans: no control but theirs was submitted to; even in camp they alone had the right to bind and flog, and in all public assemblies they kept order: these functions they assumed as ministers of the supreme, invisible Being. There was, however, no priestly caste, and each head of a family could perform religious offices for his own household.
Thus we find, at this earliest period of the known history of our river—its banks occupied by a brave, hardy race, given to dissipation and war, and governed by priests whose bloody sacrifices were offered to a supreme Being, worshipped through His great emblems of sun, fire, and water—they enjoyed a life of action, and looked forward to a death of glory.
Under this rugged nature appear the gentler attributes of love and veneration; and a belief in Fairies, Kobolds, Nixies, and all the different classes of superior existences with which they supposed the whole world to teem.
Savage and grand, loving and honourable, we shall, if we examine history, find them first engaging the Romans on equal terms, then for a while giving place to the conquerors of the world, but ever holding themselves superior to them, not adopting their habits but merely borrowing their knowledge to render themselves more fit to encounter them; and finally, we shall find them supplanting these world-conquerors, and seizing for themselves that crown and dominion, the fairest portion of which remains with the German race to this present day. And, moreover, it is this German race that has carried civilisation over the whole earth, and whose descendants, the English people, are rapidly populating the great continents of America and Australia.
Back from the train of old history our thoughts return as the evening closes in by the source of our sweet river, and we bend our steps down through the dim woods. The white butterflies flap past, heavily, as though feeling the last moments of their short lives are fleeting fast; frequently above our heads starts out a projecting mass of rock, from whose summit a great pine towers up, first leaning forward, then shooting upwards, its top seems piercing the blue sky.