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It is very well, no doubt, for wild, half-barbarous girls like Kalliope to engage in fights with German sailors; but for a civilized American, a graduate of a university, such things are impossible. And for a Queen! Can a queen brawl without hopeless loss of dignity?
Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened not his tea.
This half-barbarous crowd had the ancient faith in the gods unweakened, and the legends, which had become dim to pure Greek and Roman, some of which had originated in their immediate neighbourhood, still found full credence among them.
And with full knowledge of the strange, subtle, superconscious thing that had been between them from the first and which had manifested itself in devious mystic ways, Andrew Sevier had dared to think he could hold her in his arms in an atmosphere charged with the call of a half-barbarous music and take farewell of her she all unknowing of what threatened!
I shrank from picturing this young and beautiful girl as the wife of old Griffith Hawke, sharing with him the uncouth and half-barbarous life of a wilderness trading post. It was too cruel for belief! "Who sent you, stupid?" she repeated. "Are you truly Miss Hatherton?" I asked. "Of course I am!"
If you would, in compliance with your father's advice, enquire into the old tenures and old charters of Scotland, you would certainly open to yourself many striking scenes of the manners of the middle ages. The feudal system, in a country half-barbarous, is naturally productive of great anomalies in civil life.
Eastern products from India and elsewhere silks, spices, camphor, musk, pearls, and ivory were brought by the Mohammedans from the East to the commercial towns of Palestine and Syria; then, through the Italian merchants, they found their way into France and Germany, suggesting ideas of luxury hitherto scarcely dreamed of by the still half-barbarous Franks.
If a movement has really begun in the general popular mind of the nations, and if the principle of it is growing and insuppressible, so that it must in one manner or another ultimately prevail, what will the state be of any national community where it shall be an unenlightened, half-barbarous people that so prevails? a people no better informed, perhaps, than to believe that all the hardship and distress endured by themselves and their forefathers were wrongs, which they suffered from the higher orders; than to ascribe to bad government, and the rapacity and selfishness of the rich, the very evils caused by inclement seasons; and than to assume it as beyond question, that the whole accumulation of their resentments, brought out into action at last, is only justice demanding and inflicting a retribution.
We, the civilised, need physiologists to remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them. Those old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on them. But fair Nausicaa must have been some will say surely a mere child of nature, and an uncultivated person?
There may, it is true, remain in some minds a certain fear about Russia, because it is difficult to dispel the old conception of a great despotic Russian autocracy, or, if we like to say so, a semi-eastern and half-barbarous power biding her time to push her conquests both towards the rising and the setting sun. But many happy signs of quite a new spirit in Russia have helped to allay our fears.
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