sadness, mark the few legends and songs of the days which followed
the fall of Rome. They had done a great work. They had destroyed a
mighty tyranny; they had parted between them the spoils wrung from
all the nations; they had rid the earth of a mighty man-devouring
ogre, whose hands had been stretched out for centuries over all the
earth, dragging all virgins to his den, butchering and torturing
thousands for his sport; foul, too, with crimes for which their
language, like our own (thank God) has scarcely found a name.
Babylon the Great, drunken with the blood of the saints, had fallen
at last before the simple foresters of the north: but if it looks a
triumph to us, it looked not such to them. They could only think how
they had stained their hands in their brothers' blood. They had got
the fatal Nibelungen hoard: but it had vanished between their hands,
and left them to kill each other, till none was left.

You know the Nibelungen Lied? That expresses, I believe, the key-
note of the old Teuton's heart, after his work was done. Siegfried
murdered by his brother-in-law; fair Chriemhild turned into an
avenging fury; the heroes hewing each other down, they scarce know
why, in Hunnish Etzel's hall, till Hagen and Gunther stand alone;
Dietrich of Bern going in, to bind the last surviving heroes;
Chriemhild shaking Hagen's gory head in Gunther's face, himself hewed
down by the old Hildebrand, till nothing is left but stark corpses
and vain tears: --while all the while the Nibelungen hoard, the cause
of all the woe, lies drowned in the deep Rhine until the judgment
day.--What is all this, but the true tale of the fall of Rome, of the
mad quarrels of the conquering Teutons? The names are confused,
mythic; the dates and places all awry: but the tale is true--too
true. Mutato nomine fabula narratur. Even so they went on, killing,
till none were left. Deeds as strange, horrible, fratricidal, were