Page:The Bible of Amiens.djvu/80

50 Lion-hearts, and Oak-hearts, so they), merciless as the herded hound, enduring as the wild birch-tree and pine. You will hear of few beside them for five centuries yet to come: Visigoths, west of Vistula;—Ostrogoths, east of Vistula; radiant round little Holy Island (Heligoland), our own Saxons, and Hamlet the Dane, and his foe the sledded Polack on the ice,—all these south of Baltic; and, pouring across Baltic, constantly, her mountain-ministered strength, Scandinavia, until at last site for a time rules all, and the Norman name is of disputeless dominion, from the North Cape to Jerusalem.

13. This is the apparent, this the only recognised world history, as I have said, for five centuries to come. And yet the real history is underneath all this. The wandering armies are, in the heart of them, only living hail, and thunder, and fire along the ground. But the Suffering Life, the rooted heart of native humanity, growing up in eternal gentleness, howsoever wasted, forgotten, or spoiled, —itself neither wasting, nor wandering, nor slaying, but unconquerable by grief or death, became the seed ground of all love, that was to be born in due time; giving, then, to mortality, what hope, joy, or genius it could receive; and—if there be immortality—rendering out of the grave to the Church