214 THE HUNS OF ATTILA. 



Sarmatia the shock may have been communicated to the dwellers 

 on the Baltic. 



How strange and grand on the chronicles of the past are these 

 nomadic irruptions! A nation with its unnumbered millions 

 starts up by one common impulse, and moves on over mountains 

 and deserts and river barriers, from one climate to another, from 

 continent to continent. Without a regret or a backward look, 

 they leave the familiar scenes of home and of country, the spot 

 where lie their buried dead, and carelessly roam, they know not 

 whither. We look upon such movements with amazement, who 

 have been wont to witness the never dying attachment of our 

 own aborigines to the home of their childhood, the land of their 

 fathers. And nothing more clearly disproves their common 

 origin with the wild Tartars of upper Asia, than these diverse 

 instincts of their natures. The Indian, whose all of future hope 

 and religion lies centered in the earth-mound where, with his 

 tomahawk and scalping . knife by his side, his blanket and his 

 trophies around him, he shall rest from the toil of the hunts and 

 the dances of the spirit land, turns with a longing stronger than 

 the instinct of life to the hillocks in the forest which he has 

 reared for burial mounds. But the Celt or the Tartar cared little 

 where bleached the bones of his ancestors, or where over his own 

 unheeded body the carrion beasts should hold their revel. His 

 religion taught him to dread only the death of the coward and 

 the craven that only the souls of the brave are the care of their 

 gods. 



These rude nomads tilled no soil and gathered in no harvests. 

 Their sustenance was their flocks and herds, their only domestic 

 arts the cure of meats and the preparations of milk. Their 

 dwellings were tents and wagons, a perpetual encampment, 

 within which were nightly gathered their numerous animals. 

 For amusement they hunted the hare, the deer, the stag, and the 

 elk. But no chase was so welcome as to rouse the angry boar, to 

 grapple with the hungry bear, or to encounter the fierce tiger of 

 the northern forests. They worshiped only the god of war and 

 him whose voice was in the thunder. And for these stern 

 divinities the altars often, reeked with the blood of human 



