in the far-away, questionable days when states were forming:  even those stalwart figures we see so well as they emerge from the deep forests of Germany, to displace the Roman in all his western provinces and set up the states we know and marvel upon at this day, show us men working their new work at their own level.  They do not turn back a long cycle of years from the old and settled states, the ordered cities, the tilled fields, and the elaborated governments of an ancient civilization, to begin as it were once more at the beginning.  They carry alike their homes and their states with them in the camp and upon the ordered march of the host.  They are men of the forest, or else men hardened always to take the sea in open boats.  They live no more roughly in the new lands than in the old.  The world has been frontier for them from the first.  They may go forward with their life in these new seats from where they left off in the old.  How different the circumstances of our first settlement and the building of new states on this side the sea!  Englishmen, bred in law and ordered government ever since the Norman lawyers were followed a long five hundred years ago across the narrow seas by those masterful administrators of the strong Plantagenet race, leave an ancient realm and come into a wilderness where states have never been; leave a land of art and letters, which saw but yesterday “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” where Shakespeare still lives in the gracious leisure of his closing days at Stratford, where cities teem with trade and men go bravely dight in cloth of gold, and turn back six centuries,—­nay, a thousand years and more,—­to the first work of building states in a wilderness!  They bring the steadied habits and sobered thoughts of an ancient realm into the wild air of an untouched continent.  The weary stretches of a vast sea lie, like a full thousand years of time, between them and the life in which till now all their thought was bred.  Here they stand, as it were, with all their tools left behind, centuries struck out of their reckoning, driven back upon the long dormant instincts and forgotten craft of their race, not used this long age.  Look how singular a thing:  the work of a primitive race, the thought of a civilized!  Hence the strange, almost grotesque groupings of thought and affairs in that first day of our history.  Subtle politicians speak the phrases and practice the arts of intricate diplomacy from council chambers placed within log huts within a clearing.  Men in ruffs and lace and polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of primeval forests.  The microscopical distinctions of the schools, the thin notes of a metaphysical theology are woven in and out through the labyrinths of grave sermons that run hours long upon the still air of the wilderness.  Belief in dim refinements of dogma is made the test for man or woman who seeks admission to a company of pioneers.  When went there by an age since the great flood when so singular a thing was seen as this:  thousands of civilized men suddenly rusticated and bade do the work of primitive peoples,—­Europe frontiered!