Meanwhile, far away towards the north, the Germanic tribes, continually at strife with their neighbours, and warring against each other, without riches or culture, ignorant and savage, preserved their strength and kept their ferocity. They hated peace, despised the arts, and had no literature but drinking and war-songs. They take an interest only in hunting and war, said Caesar; from their earliest infancy they endeavour to harden themselves physically.[28] They were not inventive; they learned with more difficulty than the Celts; they were violent and irrepressible. The little that is known of their customs and character points to fiery souls that may rise to great rapturous joys but have an underlayer of gloom, a gloom sombre as the impenetrable forest, sad as the grey sea. For them the woods are haunted, the shades of night are peopled with evil spirits, in their morasses half-divine monsters lie coiled. "They worship demons," wrote the Christian chroniclers of them with a sort of terror.[29] These men will enjoy lyric songs, but not charming tales; they are capable of mirth but not of gaiety; powerful but incomplete natures that will need to develop fully without having to wait for the slow procedure of centuries, an admixture of new blood and new ideas. They were to find in Britain this double graft, and an admirable literary development was to be the consequence. They set out then to accomplish their work and follow their destiny, having doubtless much to learn, but having also something to teach the enervated nations, the meaning of a word unknown till their coming, the word "war" (_guerre, guerra_). After the time of the invasions "bellicose," "belliqueux," and such words lost their strength and dignity, and were left for songsters to play with if they liked; a tiny phenomenon, the sign of terrible transformations. The invaders bore various names. The boundaries of their tribes, as regards population and territory, were vague, and in nowise resembled those of the kingdoms traced on our maps. Their groups united and dissolved continually. The most powerful among them absorb their neighbours and cause them to be forgotten for a time, their names frequently recur in histories; then other tribes grow up; other names appear, others die out. Several of them, however, have survived: Angles, Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, Lombards, Suevi, and Alemanni, which became the names of great provinces or mighty nations. The more important of these groups were rather an agglomeration of tribes than nations properly so called; thus under the name of Franks were comprised, in the third century, the Sicambers, the Chatti, the Chamavi; while the Suevi united, in the time of Tacitus, the Lombards, Semnones, Angles, and others. But all were bound by the tie of a common origin; their passions, customs, and tastes, their arms and costumes were similar.[30]