Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again!

W. Wordsworth.

ESSAYS IN THE
STUDY OF FOLK-SONGS.

BY THE

COUNTESS EVELYN MARTINENGO-CESARESCO.

LONDON:
GEORGE REDWAY,

YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.
MDCCCLXXXVI.

CONTENTS

Wo man singt da lass dich ruhig nieder,

Böse Menschen haben keine Lieder.

INTRODUCTION.

It is on record that Wilhelm Mannhardt, the eminent writer on mythology and folk-lore, was once taken for a gnome by a peasant he had been questioning. His personal appearance may have helped the illusion; he was small and irregularly made, and was then only just emerging from a sickly childhood spent beside the Baltic in dreaming over the creations of popular fancy. Then, too, he wore a little red cap, which was doubtless fraught with supernatural suggestions. But above all, the story proves that Mannhardt had solved the difficulty of dealing with primitive folk; that instead of being looked upon as a profane and prying layman, he was regarded as one who was more than initiated into the mysteries—as one who was a mystery himself. And for this reason I recall it here. It exactly indicates the way to set about seeking after old lore. We ought to shake off as much as possible of our conventional civilization which frightens uneducated peasants, and makes them think, at best, that we wish to turn them into ridicule. If we must not hope to pass for spirits of earth or air, we can aim at inspiring such a measure of confidence as will persuade the natural man to tell us what he still knows of those vanishing beings, and to lend us the key to his general treasure-box before all that is inside be reduced to dust.

This, which applies directly to the collector at first hand, has also its application for the student who would profit by the materials when collected. He should approach popular songs and traditions from some other stand-point than that of mere criticism; and divesting himself of preconcerted ideas, he should try to live the life and think the thoughts of people whose only literature is that which they carry in their heads, and in whom Imagination takes the place of acquired knowledge.

I.

Research into popular traditions has now reached a stage at which the English Folk-Lore Society have found it desirable to attempt a classification of its different branches, and in future, students will perhaps devote their labours to one or another of these branches rather than to the subject as a whole. Certain of the sections thus mapped out have plainly more special attractions for a particular class of workers: beliefs and superstitions chiefly concern those who study comparative mythology; customs are of peculiar importance to the sociologist, and so on. But tales and songs, while offering points of interest to scientific specialists, appeal also to a much wider class, namely, to all who care at all for literature. For the Folk-tale is the father of all fiction, and the Folk-song is the mother of all poetry.

Mankind may be divided into the half which listens and the half which reads. For the first category in its former completeness, we must go now to the East; in Europe only the poor, and of them a rapidly decreasing proportion, have the memory to recite, the patience to hear, the faith to receive. It was not always or primarily an affair of classes: down even to a comparatively late day, the pure story-teller was a popular member of society in provincial France and Italy, and perhaps society was as well employed in listening to wonder-tales as it is at present. But there is no going back. The epitaph for the old order of things was written by the great philosopher who threw the last shovel of earth on its grave:

O l'heureux temps que celui de ces fables

Des bons démons, des esprits familiers,

Des farfadets, aux mortels secourables!

On écoutait tous ces faits admirables

Dans son château, près d'un large foyer:

Le père et l'oncle, et la mère et la fille,

Et les voisins, et toute la famille,

Ouvraient l'oreille à Monsieur l'aumônier,

Qui leur fesait des contes de sorcier.

On a banni les démons et les fées;

Sous la raison les grâces etouffées,

Livrent nous cœurs à l'insipidité;

Le raisonner tristement s'accrédite;

On court, hélas! après la verité,

Ah! croyez-moi, l'erreur a son mérite.[¹]

Folk-songs differ from folk-tales by the fact of their making a more emphatic claim to credibility. Prose is allowed to be more fanciful, more frivolous than poetry. It deals with the brighter side; the hero and heroine in the folk-tale marry and live happily ever after; in the popular ballad they are but rarely united save in death. To the blithe supernaturalism of elves and fairies, the folk-poet prefers the solemn supernaturalism of ghost-lore.

The folk-song probably preceded the folk-tale. If we are to judge either by early record or by the analogy of backward peoples, it seems proved that in infant communities anything that was thought worth remembering was sung. It must have been soon ascertained that words rhythmically arranged take, as a rule, firmer root than prose. "As I do not know how to read," says a modern Greek folk-singer, "I have made this story into a song so as not to forget it."

Popular poetry is the reflection of moments of strong collective or individual emotion. The springs of legend and poetry issue from the deepest wells of national life; the very heart of a people is laid bare in its sagas and songs. There have been times when a profound feeling of race or patriotism has sufficed to turn a whole nation into poets: this happened at the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the struggle for the Stuarts in Scotland, for independence in Greece. It seems likely that all popular epics were born of some such concordant thrill of emotion. The saying of "a very wise man" reported by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, to the effect that if one were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who made the laws, must be taken with this reservation: the ballad-maker only wields his power for as long as he is the true interpreter of the popular will. Laws may be imposed on the unwilling, but not songs.

The Brothers Grimm said that they had not found a single lie in folk-poetry. "The special value," wrote Goethe, "of what we call national songs and ballads, is that their inspiration comes fresh from nature: they are never got up, they flow from a sure spring." He added, what must continually strike anyone who is brought in contact with a primitive peasantry, "The unsophisticated man is more the master of direct, effective expression in few words than he who has received a regular literary education."

Bards chaunted the praises of head-men and heroes, and it may be guessed that almost as soon and as universally as tribes and races fell out, it grew to be the custom for each fighting chief to have one or more bards in his personal service. Robert Wace describes how William the Conqueror was followed by Taillefer, who

Mounted on steed that was swift of foot,

Went forth before the armed train

Singing of Roland and Charlemain,

Of Olivere, and the brave vassals

Who died at the Pass of Roncesvals.

The northern skalds accompanied the armies to the wars and were present at all the battles. "Ye shall be here that ye may see with your own eyes what is achieved this day," said King Olaf to his skalds on the eve of the Battle of Stiklastad (1030), "and have no occasion, when ye shall afterwards celebrate these actions in song, to depend on the reports of others." In the same fight, a skald named Jhormod died an honourable death, shot with an arrow while in the act of singing. The early Keltic poets were forbidden to bear arms: a reminiscence of their sacerdotal status, but they, too, looked on while others fought, and encouraged the combatants with their songs. All these bards served a higher purpose than the commemoration of individual leaders: they became the historians of their epoch. The profession was one of recognised eminence, and numbered kings among its adepts. Then it declined with the rise of written chronicles, till the last bard disappeared and only the ballad-singer remained.

II.

This personage, though shorn of bardic dignity, yet contrived to hold his own with considerable success. In Provence and Germany, itinerant minstrels who sang for pay brought up the rank and file of the troubadours and minnesingers; in England and Italy and Northern France they formed a class apart, which, as times went, was neither ill-esteemed nor ill-paid. When the minstrel found no better audience he mounted a barrel in the nearest tavern, or

At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.

But his favourite sphere was the baronial hall; and to understand how welcome he was there made, it is only needful to picture country life in days when books were few and newspapers did not exist. He sang before noble knights and gracious dames, who, to us—could we be suddenly brought into their presence—would seem rough in their manner, their speech, their modes of life; but who were far from being dead or insensible to intellectual pleasure when they could get it. He sang the choicest songs that had come down to him from an earlier age; songs of the Round Table and of the great Charles; and then, as he sat at meat, perhaps below the salt, but with his plate well heaped up with the best that there was, he heard strange Eastern tales from the newly-arrived pilgrim at his right hand, and many a wild story of noble love or hate from the white-haired retainer at his left.

I have always thought that the old ballad-singer's world—the world in which he moved, and again the ideal world of his songs—is nowhere to be so vividly realised as in the Hofkirche at Innsbruck, among that colossal company who watch the tomb of Kaiser Max; huge men and women in richly wrought bronze array, ugly indeed, most of them, but with two of their number seeming to embody every beautiful quality that was possessed or dreamt of through well nigh a millennium: the pensive, graceful form of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, and the erect figure whose very attitude suggests all manly worth, all gentle valour, under which is read the quaint device, "Arthur von England."

If not rewarded with sufficient promptitude and liberality, the ballad-singer was not slow to call attention to the fact. Colin Muset, a jongleur who practised his trade in Lorraine and Champagne in the thirteenth century, has left a charming photograph of contemporary manners in a song which sets forth his wants and deserts.

Lord Count, I have the viol played[²]

Before yourself, within your hall,

And you my service never paid

Nor gave me any wage at all;

'T was villany:

By faith I to Saint Mary owe,

Upon such terms I serve you not,

My alms-bag sinks exceeding low,

My trunk ill-furnished is, I wot.

Lord Count, now let me understand,

What 'tis you mean to do for me,

If with free heart and open hand

Some ample guerdon you decree

Through courtesy;

For much I wish, you need not doubt,

In my own household to return,

And if full purse I am without,

Small greeting from my wife I earn.

"Sir Engelé," I hear her say,

"In what poor country have you been,

That through the city all the day

You nothing have contrived to glean!

See how your wallet folds and bends,

Well stuffed with wind and nought beside;

Accursed is he who e'er intends

As your companion to abide."

When reached the house wherein I dwell,

And that my wife can clearly spy

My bag behind me bulge and swell,

And I myself clad handsomely

In a grey gown,

Know that she quickly throws away

Her distaff, nor of work doth reck,

She greets me laughing, kind and gay,

And twines both arms around my neck.

My wife soon seizes on my bag,

And empties it without delay;

My boy begins to groom my nag,

And hastes to give him drink and hay;

My maid meanwhile runs off to kill

Two capons, dressing them with skill

In garlic sauce;

My daughter in her hand doth bear,

Kind girl, a comb to smooth my hair.

Then in my house I am a king,

Great joyance and no sorrowing,

Happier than you can say or sing.

Ballad-singing suffered by the invention of printing, but it was in England that the professional minstrel met with the cruellest blow of all—the statute passed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth which forbade his recitations, and classed him with "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars."

"Beggars they are with one consent,

And rogues by Act of Parliament."

On the other hand, it was also in England that the romantic ballad had its revival, and was introduced to an entirely new phase of existence. The publication of the Percy Reliques (1765) started the modern period in which popular ballads were not only to be accepted as literature, but were to exercise the strongest influence on lettered poets from Goethe and Scott, down to Dante Rossetti.

Not that popular poetry had ever been without its intelligent admirers, here and there, among men of culture: Montaigne had said of it, "La poësie populere et purement naturelle a des naïfvetez et graces par où elle se compare à la principale beauté de la poësie parfaicte selon l'art: comme il se voit es villanelles de Gascouigne et aus chançons qu'on nous raporte des nations qui n'ont conoissance d'acune science, ny mesme d'escripture." There were even ardent collectors, like Samuel Pepys, who is said to have acquired copies of two thousand ballads.[³] Still, till after the appearance of Bishop Percy's book (as his own many faults of omission and commission attest), the literary class at large did not take folk-songs quite seriously. The Percy Reliques was followed by Herder's Volkslieder (1782), Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), Fauriel's Chansons Populaires de la Grêce (1824), to mention only three of its more immediate successors. The "return to Nature" in poetry became an irresistible movement; the world, tired of the classical forms of the eighteenth century, listened as gladly to the fresh voice of the popular muse, as in his father's dreary palace Giacomo Leopardi listened to the voice of the peasant girl over the way, who sang as she plied the shuttle:

Sonavan le quiete

Stanze, e le vie dintorno.

Al tuo perpetuo canto,

Allor che all opre femminili intenta

Sedevi, assai contenta

Di quel vago avvenir che in mente avevi.

Era il Maggio odoroso: e tu solevi

Così menare il giorno.

* * * * *

Lingua mortal non dice

Quel ch' io sentiva in seno.

The hunt for ballads led the way to the search for every sort of popular song, and with what zeal that search has since been prosecuted, the splendid results in the hands of the public now testify.

III.

A brief glance must be taken at what may be called domestic folk-poetry. In a remote past, rural people found delight or consolation in singing the events of their obscure lives, or in deputing other persons of their own station, but especially skilled in the art, to sing them for them. Thus there were marriage-songs and funeral-songs, labour-songs and songs for the culminating points of the pastoral or agricultural year. It is beyond my present purpose to speak of the vintage festivals, and of the literary consequences of the cult of Dionysus. I will, instead, pause for a moment to consider the ancient harvest-songs. Among the Greeks, particularly in Phrygia and in Sicily, all harvest-songs bore the generic name of Lytierses, and how they got it, gives an instructive instance of myth-facture. Lytierses was the son of King Midas, and a king himself, but also a mighty reaper, whose habit it was to indulge in trials of strength with his companions, and with strangers who were passing by. He tied the vanquished up in sheaves and beat them. One day he defied an unknown stranger, who proved too strong for him, and by whom he was slain. So died Lytierses, the reaper, and the first "Lytierses," or harvest-song, was composed to console his father, King Midas, for his loss.

Now, if we regard Lytierses as the typical agriculturist, and his antagonist as the growth or vegetation genius, the fable seems to read thus: Between man and Nature there is a continual struggle; man is often victorious, but, if too presumptuous, a time comes when he must yield. In harvest customs continued to this day, a struggle with or for the last sheaf forms a common feature. The reapers of Western France tie the sheaf, adorned with flowers, to a post driven strongly into the ground, then they fetch the farmer and his wife and all the farm folk to help in dragging it loose, and when the fastenings break, it is borne off in triumph. So popular is this Fête de la Gerbe, that, during the Chouan war, the leaders had to allow their peasant soldiers to return to their villages to attend it, or they would have deserted in a body. It may not be irrelevant to add that in Brittany the great wrestling matches take place at the fête of the "new threshing floor," when all the neighbours are invited to unite in preparing it for the corn. In North Germany, where the peasants still believe that the last sheaf contains the growth-genius, they set it in honour on the festive board, and serve it double portions of cake and ale.[⁴] Thus appeased, it becomes a friend to the cultivator. The harvest "man" or "tree" which used to be made by English reapers at the end of the harvest, and presented to master and mistress, obviously belonged to the same family.

We have one or two of the ancient Lytierses in what is most likely very nearly their original and popular form. One, composed of distiches telling the story of Midas' son, is preserved in a tragedy by Sosibius, the Syracusian poet. The following, more general in subject, I take from the tenth Idyl of Theocritus:—

Come now hearken awhile to the songs of the god Lytierses.

Demeter, granter of fruits, many sheaves vouchsafe to the cornfield,

Aye to be skilfully tilled, and reaped, and the harvest abundant.

Fasten the heaps, ye binders of sheaves, lest any one passing,

Call out, "worthless clowns, you earn no part of your wages."

Let every sheaf that the sickle has cut be turned to the north wind

Or to the west exposed, for so will the corn grow fatter.

Ye who of wheat are threshers, beware how ye slumber at mid-day,

Then is the chaff from the stalk of the wheat, most easily parted.

Reapers, to labour begin, as soon as the lark upriseth,

And when he sleeps, leave off, yet rest when the sun overpowers.

Blest, O youths, is the life of a frog, for he never is anxious

Who is to pour him his drink, for he always has plenty.

Better at once, O miserly steward, to boil our lentils;

Mind you don't cut your fingers in trying to chop them to atoms.

These are the songs for the toilers to sing in the heat of the harvest.

Most modern harvest songs manage, like that of Theocritus, to convey some hint of thirst or hunger. "Be merry, O comrades!" sing the girl reapers of Casteignano dei Greci, a Greek settlement in Terra d'Otranto, "Be merry, and go not on your way so downcast; I saw things you cannot see; I saw the housewife kneading dough, or preparing macaroni; and she does it for us to eat, so that we may work like lions at the harvest, and rejoice the heart of the husbandman." This may be a statement of fact or a suggestion of what ought to be a fact. Other songs, sung exclusively at the harvest, bear no outward sign of connection with it; and the reason of their use on that occasion is hopelessly lost.

IV.

I pass on to the old curiosity shop of popular traditions—the nursery. Children, with their innate conservatism, have stored a vast assemblage of odds and ends which fascinate by their very incompleteness. Religion, mythology, history, physical science, or what stood for it; the East, the North—those great banks of ideas—have been impartially drawn on by the infant folk-lorists at their nurses' knees. Children in the four quarters of the globe, repeat the same magic formulæ; words which to every grown person seem devoid of sense, have a universality denied to any articles of faith. What, for example, is the meaning of the play with the snail? Why is he so persistently asked to put his horns out? Pages might be filled with the variants of the well-known invocation which has currency from Rome to Pekin.

English:

I.

Snail, snail, put out your horn,

Or I'll kill your father and mother the morn.

2.

Snail, snail, come out of your hole,

Or else I'll beat you as black as a coal.

3.

Snail, snail, put out your horn,

Tell me what's the day t'morn:

To-day's the morn to shear the corn,

Blaw bil buck thorn.

4.

Snail, snail, shoot out your horn,

Father and mother are dead;

Brother and sister are in the back-yard

Begging for barley bread.

Scotch:

Snail, snail, shoot out your horn,

And tell us it will be a bonnie day, the morn.

German:

1.

Schneckhûs, Peckhüs,

Stäk du dîn ver Horner rût,

Süst schmût ick dî in'n Graven,

Da freten dî de Raven.

2.

Tækeltuet,

Kruep uet dyn hues,

Dyn hues dat brennt,

Dyn Kinder de flennt:

Dyn Fru de ligt in Wäken:

Kann 'k dy nich mael spräken?

Tækeltuet, u. s. w.

3.

Snaek, snaek, komm herduet,

Sunst tobräk ik dy dyn Hues.

4.

Slingemues,

Kruep uet dyn Hues,

Stick all dyn veer Höern uet,

Wullt du 's neck uetstäken,

Wik ik dyn Hues tobräken.

Slingemues, u. s. w.

5.

Kuckuch, kuckuck Gerderut,

Stäk dîne vêr Horns herut.

French:

Colimaçon borgne!

Montre-moi tes cornes;

Je te dirai où ta mère est morte,

Elle est morte à Paris, à Rouen,

Où l'on sonne les cloches.

Bi, bim, bom,

Bi, bim, bom,

Bi, bim, bom.

Tuscan:

Chiocciola, chiocciola, vien da me,

Ti darò i' pan d' i' re;

E dell'ova affrittellate

Corni secchí e brucherate.

Roumanian:

Culbecu, culbecu,

Scóte corne boeresci

Si te du la Dunare

Si bé apa tulbure.

Russian:

Ulitka, ulitka,

Vypusti roga,

Ya tebé dam piroga.[⁵]

Chinese:

Snail, snail, come here to be fed,

Put out your horns and lift up your head;

Father and mother will give you to eat,

Good boiled mutton shall be your meat.

Several lines in the second German version are evidently borrowed from the Ladybird or Maychafer rhyme which has been pronounced a relic of Freya worship. Here the question arises, is not the snail song also derived from some ancient myth? Count Gubernatis, in his valuable work on Zoological Mythology (vol. ii. p. 75), dismisses the matter with the remark that "the snail of superstition is demoniacal." This, however, is no proof that he always bore so suspicious a character, since all the accessories to past beliefs got into bad odour on the establishment of Christianity, unless saved by dedication to the Virgin or other saints. I ventured to suggest, in the Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari (the Italian Folklore Journal), that the snail who is so constantly urged to come forth from his dark house, might in some way prefigure the dawn. Horns have been from all antiquity associated with rays of light. But to write of "Nature Myths in Nursery Rhymes" is to enter on such dangerous ground that I will pursue the argument no further.

V.

Children of older years have preserved the very important class of songs distinguished as singing-games. Everyone knows the famous ronde of the Pont d'Avignon:

Sur le Pont d'Avignon,

Tout le monde y danse, danse,

Sur le Pont d'Avignon

Tout le monde y danse en rond.

Les beaux messieurs font comme ça,

Sur le Pont d'Avignon,

Tout le monde y danse, danse,

Sur le Pont d'Avignon,

Tout le monde y danse en rond.

After the "messieurs" who bow, come the "demoiselles" who curtsey; the workwomen who sew, the carpenters who saw wood, the washerwomen who wash linen, and a host of other folks intent on their different callings. The song is an apt demonstration of what Paul de Saint-Victor called "cet instinct inné de l'imitation qui fait similer à l'enfant les actions viriles"[⁶]—in which instinct lies the germ of the theatre. The origin of all spectacles was a performance intended to amuse the performers, and it cannot be doubted that the singing-game throws much light on the beginnings of scenic representations.

Rondes frequently deal with love and marriage, and these, from internal evidence, cannot have been composed by or for the young people who now play them. There are in fact some which would be better forgotten by everybody, but the majority are innocent little dramas, of which it may truly be said, Honi soit qui mal y pense. It should be noticed that a distinctly satirical vein runs through many of these games, as in the "Gentleman from Spain,"—played in one form or another all over Europe and the United States,—in which the suitor would first give any money to get his bride, and then any money to get rid of her. Or the Swedish Lek (the name given in Sweden to the singing-game), in which the companions of a young girl put her sentiments to the test of telling her that father, mother, sisters, brothers, are dead—all of which she hears with perfect equanimity—but when they add that her betrothed is also dead, she falls back fainting. Then all her kindred are resuscitated without the effect of reviving her, but when she hears that her lover is alive and well, she springs up and gives chase to her tormentors.

To my mind there is no more remarkable specimen of the singing game than Jenny Jones—through which prosaic title we can discern the tender Jeanne ma joie that formed the base of it. The Scotch still say Jenny Jo, "Jo" being with them a term of endearment (e.g., "John Anderson, my Jo!"). The following variant of the game I took down from word of mouth at Bocking in Essex:—

"We've come to see Jenny Jones, Jenny Jones, (repeat).

How is she now?

Jenny is washing, washing, washing,

Jenny is washing, you can't see her now.

We've come to see Jenny Jones.

How is she now?

Jenny is folding, folding, folding,

You can't see her now.

We've come to see Jenny Jones.

How is she now?

Jenny is starching, starching, starching,

Jenny is starching, you can't see her now.

We've come to see Jenny Jones.

How is she now?

Jenny is ironing, ironing, ironing,

Jenny is ironing, you can't see her now.

We've come to see Jenny Jones.

How is she now?

Jenny is ill, ill, ill,

Jenny is ill, so you can't see her now.

We've come to see Jenny Jones.

How is she now?

(Mournfully.)

Jenny is dead, dead, dead,

Jenny is dead, you can't see her now.

May we come to the funeral?

Yes.

May we come in red?

Red is for soldiers; you can't come in red.

May we come in blue?

Blue is for sailors; you can't come in blue.

May we come in white?

White is for weddings; you can't come in white.

May we come in black?

Black is for funerals, so you can come in that.

Jenny is then carried and buried (i.e., laid on the grass) by two of the girls, while the rest follow as mourners, uttering a low, prolonged wail.

Perhaps the earliest acted tragedy—a tragedy acted before Æschylus lived—was something like this. Anyhow, it may remind us of how early a taste for the tragic is developed, if not in the life of mankind at all events in the life of man. "What is the reason," asks St Augustine, "that men wish to be moved by the sight of tragic and painful things, which, nevertheless, they do not wish to undergo themselves? For the spectators (at a play) desire to feel grieved, and this grief is their joy: whence comes it unless from some strange spiritual malady?"[⁷]

Dr Pitrè describes this Sicilian game: A child lies down, pretending to be dead. His companions stand round and sing a dirge in the most dolorous tones. Now and then, one of them runs up to him and lifts an arm or a leg, afterwards letting it fall, to make sure that he is quite dead. Satisfied on this point, they prepare to bury him, but before doing so, they nearly stifle him with parting kisses. Tired, at last, of his painful position, the would-be dead boy jumps up and gets on the back of the most aggressive of his playmates, who is bound to carry him off the scene.

To play at funerals was probably a very ancient amusement. No doubt some such game as the above is alluded to in the text, "...children sitting in the markets and calling unto their fellows and saying, We have piped unto you and ye have not danced, we have mourned unto you and ye have not lamented."

VI.

Mysteries and Miracle Plays must not be forgotten, though in their origin they were not a plant of strictly popular growth. Some writers consider that they were instituted by ecclesiastics as rivals to the lay or pagan plays which were still in great favour in the first Christian centuries. Others think with Dr Hermann Ulrici,[⁸] that they grew naturally out of the increasingly pictorial celebration of the early Greek liturgy,—painted scenes developing into tableaux vivants, and these into acted and spoken interludes. It is certain that they were started by the clergy, who at first were the sole actors, assuming characters of both sexes. As time wore on, something more lively was desired, and clowns and buffoons were accordingly introduced. They appeared in the Innsbruck Play of the fourteenth century; and again in 1427, in the performances given at Metz, while the serious parts were acted by ecclesiastics, the lighter, or comic parts, were represented by laymen. These performances were held in a theatre constructed for the purpose, but mysteries were often played in the churches themselves, nor is the practice wholly abandoned. A Nativity play is performed in the churches of Upper Gascony on Christmas Eve, of which the subjoined account will, perhaps, be read with interest:—

In the middle of the Midnight Mass, just when the priest has finished reading the gospel, Joseph and Mary enter the nave, the former clad in the garb of a village carpenter with his tools slung across his shoulder, the latter dressed in a robe of spotless white. The people divide so as to let them pass up the church, and they look about for a night's lodging. In one part of the church the stable of Bethlehem is represented behind a framework of greenery; here they take up their position, and presently a cradle is placed beside them which contains the image of a babe. The voice of an angel from on high now proclaims the birth of the Infant Saviour, and calls on the shepherds to draw near to the sound of glad music. The way in which this bit of theatrical "business" is managed, is by a child in a surplice, with wings fastened to his shoulders, being drawn up to the ceiling seated on a chair, which is supported by ropes on a pulley. The shepherds, real shepherds in white, homespun capes, with long crooks decked with ribbons, are placed on a raised dais, which stands for the mountain. They wake up when they hear the angel's song, and one of them exclaims:

Diou dou cèou, quino vèro vouts!

Un anjou mous parlo, pastous;

Biste quieten noste troupet!

Mes que dit l'anjou, si vous plaît?

(Heavens! with how sweet a voice

The angel calls us to rejoice;

Quick leave your flocks: but tell me, pray,

What doth the heavenly angel say?)

The angel replies in French:

Rise, shepherd, nor delay,

'Tis God who summons thee,

Hasten with zeal away

Thy Saviour's self to see.

The Lord of Hosts hath shown

That since this glorious birth,

War shall be no more known,

But peace shall reign on earth.

The shepherds, however, are not very willing to be disturbed: "Let me sleep! Let me sleep!" says one of them, and another goes so far as to threaten to drive away the angel if he does not let them alone. "Come and render homage to the new-born babe," sings the angel, "and cease to complain of your happy lot." They answer:

A happy lot

We never yet possest,

A happy lot

For us poor shepherd folk existeth not;

Then wherefore utter the strange jest

That by an infant's birth we shall be blest

With happy lot?

The shepherds begin to bestir themselves. One says that he feels overcome with fear at the sound of so much noise and commotion. The angel responds, "Come without fear; do not hesitate, but redouble your speed. It is in this village, in a poor place, near yonder wood, that you may see the Infant Lord." Another of the shepherds, who seems to have only just woke up, inquires:

What do you say?

This to believe what soul is able;

What do you say?

Where do these shepherds speed away?

To see their God within a stable:

This surely seems an idle fable;

What do you say?

"To understand how it is, go and behold with your own eyes," replies the angel; to which the shepherd answers, "Good morrow, angel; pardon me if I have spoken lightly; I will go and see what is going on." Another, still not quite easy in his mind, observes that he cannot make out what the angel says, because he speaks in such a strange tongue. The angel immediately replies in excellent Gascon patois:

Come, shepherds, come

From your mountain home,

Come, see the Saviour in a stable born,

This happy morn.

Come, shepherds, come,

Let none remain behind,

Come see the wretched sinners' friend,

The Saviour of mankind.

When they hear the good news, sung to a quaint and inspiriting air in their own language, the shepherds hesitate no longer, but set off for Bethlehem in a body. One of them, it is true, expresses some doubts as to what will become of the flocks in their absence; but a veteran shepherd strikes his crook upon the ground and sternly reproves him for being anxious about the sheep when a heavenly messenger has declared that "God has made Himself the Shepherd of mankind." They leave the dais, and march out of the church, the whole of which is now considered as being the stable. After a while the shepherds knock for admittance, and their voices are heard in the calm crisp midnight air chaunting these words to sweet and solemn strains:

Master of this blest abode,

O guardian of the Infant God,

Open your honoured gate, that we

May at His worship bend the knee.

Joseph fears that the strangers may perchance be enemies, but reassured by an angel, he opens the door, only naïvely regretting that the lowly chamber "should be so badly lighted." They prostrate themselves before the cradle, and the choir bursts forth with:

Gloria Deo in excelsis,

O Domine te laudamus,

O Deus Pater rex caelestis,

In terra pax hominibus.

The shepherdesses then render their homage, and deposit on the altar steps a banner covered with flowers and greenery, from which hang strings of small birds, apples, nuts, chestnuts, and other fruits. It is their Christmas offering to the curé; the shepherds have already placed a whole sheep before the altar, in a like spirit.

The next scene takes us into Herod's palace, where the magi arrive, and are directed to proceed to Bethlehem. During their adoration of the Infant Saviour, Mass is finished, and the Sacrament is administered; after which the play is brought to a close with the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the Innocents.

This primitive drama gives a better idea of the early mysteries than do the performances at Ober Ammergau, which have been gradually pruned and improved under the eye of a critical public. But it is unusually free from the absurdities and levities which abound in most miracle plays; such as the wrangle between Noah and his wife in the old Chester Mysteries, in which the latter declares "by St John" that the Flood is a false alarm, and that no power on earth shall make her go into the Ark. Noah ends with putting her on board by main force, and is rewarded by a box on the ear.

The best surviving sample of a non-scriptural rustic play is probably Saint Guillaume of Poitou, a Breton versified drama in seven acts. The history of the Troubadour Count whose wicked manhood leads to a preternaturally pious old age, corresponds to every requirement of the peasant play-goer. Time and space are set airily at defiance; saints and devils are not only called, but come at the shortest notice; the plot is exciting enough to satisfy the strongest craving for sensation, and the dialogue is vigorous, and, in parts, picturesque. One can well believe that the fiery if narrow patriotism of a Breton audience would be stirred by the scene where the reformed Count William, who has withstood all other blandishments, is almost lured out of his holy seclusion by the Evil One coming to him in the shape of a fellow-townsman who represents his city as hard pressed by overwhelming foes, and in its extremest need, imploring his aid; that the religious fervour of Breton peasants would be moved by the recital of the vision in which a very wicked man appears at the bar of judgment: his sins out-number the hairs of his head, you would call him an irredeemable wretch; yet it does so happen that once upon a time he gave two pilgrims a bed of straw in a pig-stye, and now St Francis throws this straw into the balance, and it bends down the scale!

So in the Song of the Sun, in Sæmund's Edda, a fierce freebooter, who has despoiled mankind, and who always ate alone, opens his door one evening to a tired wayfarer, and gives him meat and drink. The guest meditates evil; then in his sleep he murders his host, but he is doomed to take on him all the sins of the man he has slain, while the one-time evil-doer's soul is borne by angels into a life of purity, where it shall live for ever with God. This motive is repeatedly introduced into folk-lore, and was made effective use of by Victor Hugo in Sultan Mourad, the infamous tyrant who goes to Heaven on the strength of having felt momentary compassion for a pig.

In plays of the Saint Guillaume class, the plain language in which the vices and oppression of the nobles is denounced shows signs of the slow surging up of the democratic spirit whose traces through the middle ages are nowhere to be more fruitfully sought than in popular literature—though they lie less in the rustic drama than in the great mediæval satires, such as Reynard the Fox and Marcolfo, the latter of which is still known to the Italian people under the form of Bertoldo, in which it was recast in the sixteenth century, by G. B. Croce, the rhyming blacksmith of Bologna.

VII.

Epopees, chansons de geste, romantic ballads, occasional or ceremonial songs, nursery rhymes, singing-games, rustic dramas; to these must be added the great order of purely personal and lyrical songs, of which the unique and exclusive subject is love. Popular love songs have one quality in common: a sincerity which is not perhaps reached in the entire range of lettered amorous poetry. Love is to these singers a thing so serious that however high they fly, they do not outsoar what is to them the atmosphere of truth. "La passion parle là toute pure," as Molière said of the old song:

Si le roi m'avoit donné

Paris, sa grande ville,

Et qu'il me fallût quitter

L'amour de ma mie:

Je dirois au roi Henri

Reprenez votre Paris

J'aime mieux ma mie, oh gay!

J'aime mieux ma mie.

An immense, almost incredible, number of popular songs have been set down during the last twenty years by collectors who, like Tigri in Tuscany, and Pitrè in Sicily, have done honour to their birthlands, and an enduring service to literature. It has been seen that Italy, Portugal, and Spain have songs which, though differing in shape, are yet materially alike. Where was the original fount of this lyrical river? Some would look for it in Arabia, and cite the evident poetic fertility of those countries where Arab influence once prevailed. Others regard the existing passion-verse as a descendant of the mediæval poetry associated with Provence. Others, again, while admitting that there may have been modifications of form, find it hard to believe that there was ever a time, since the type was first established, when the southern peasant was dumb, or when he did not sing in substance very much as he does now.

Whatever theory be ultimately accepted, it is certain that the popular love-poetry of southern nations, such as it has been received direct from peasant lips, is not the least precious gift we owe to the untaught, uncultured poet, who after having been for long ages ignored or despised, is now raised to his rightful place near the throne of his illustrious brother, the perfect lettered poet. Pan sits unrebuked by the side of Apollo.

These introductory remarks are meant to do no more than to show the principal landmarks of folk-poetry. The subject is a wide one, as they best know who have given it the most careful attention. In the following essays, I have dealt with a few of its less familiar aspects. I would, in conclusion, express my gratitude to the indefatigable excavators of popular lore whose large labours have made my small work possible, and to all who have helped, whether by furnishing unedited specimens or by procuring copies of rare books. My cordial thanks are also due to the editors and publishers of the Cornhill Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, the National Review, the British Quarterly Review, the Revue Internationale, the Antiquary, and the Record and Journal of the Folk-lore Society, for leave to reprint such part of this book as had appeared in those publications.

Salò, Lago di Garda,

January 15 1886.

[Footnote 1:] Voltaire.

[Footnote 2:]

Sire cuens, j'ai vielé

Devant vous, en vostre osté;

Si ne m'avez, riens doné,

Ne mes gages aquité

C'est vilanie;

Foi que doi Sainte Marie!

Ainc ne vos sievrai je mie,

M'aumosniere est mal garnie

Et ma malle mal farsie.

Sire cuens, quar comandez

De moi vostre volonté.

Sire, s'il vous vient à gré

Un beau don car me donez

Par cortoisie.

Talent ai, n'en dotez mie,

De r'aler à ma mesnie.

Quant vois borse desgarnie,

Ma feme ne me rit mie.

Ains me dit: Sire Engelé

En quel terre avez esté,

Qui n'avez rien conquesté

Aval la ville?

Vez com vostre male plie,

Ele est bien de vent farsie.

Honi soit qui a envie

D'estre en vostre compaignie.

Quant je vieng à mon hosté

Et ma feme a regardé

Derier moi le sac enflé,

Et ge qui sui bien paré

De robe grise,

Sachiez qu'ele a tot jus mise

La quenoille, sans faintise.

Elle me rit par franchise,

Les deux bras au col me lie.

Ma feme va destrousser

Ma male, sanz demorer.

Mon garçon va abruver

Mon cheval et conreer.

Ma pucele va tuer

Deux chapons por deporter

A la sause aillie;

Ma fille m'apporte un pigne.

En sa main par cortoisie

Lors sui de mon ostel sire,

A mult grant joie, sans ire,

Plus que nus ne porroit dire.

[Footnote 3:] Not to speak of Charlemagne, who ordered a collection to be made of German songs.

[Footnote 4:] A fuller description of German harvest customs, with remarks on their presumed meaning, will be found in the Rev. J. Van den Gheyn's "Essais de Mythologie et de Philologie comparée," 1885.

[Footnote 5:] Mr W. R. S. Ralston has kindly communicated to me this Russian version, which he translates: "Snail, snail, put forth thy horns, I will give to thee cakes."

[Footnote 6:] "Les deux Masques," tome i. p. 1.

[Footnote 7:] "Confessions," book iii. chap. 11.

[Footnote 8:] "Shakespeare's Dramatic Art," 1876.

THE INSPIRATION OF DEATH IN FOLK-POETRY.

The Roumanians call death "the betrothed of the world:" that which awaits. The Neapolitans give it the name of la vedova: that which survives. It would be easy to go on multiplying the stock of contrasting epithets. Inevitable yet a surprise, of daily incidence yet a mystery, unvarying yet most various, a common fact yet incapable of becoming common-place, death may be looked at from innumerable points of view; but, look at it how we will, it moves and excites our spiritual consciousness as nothing else can do. The first poet of human things was perhaps one who stood in the presence of death. In the twilight that went before civilization the loves of men were prosaic, and intellectual unrest was remote, but there was already Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not. Death, high priest of the ideal, led man in his infancy through a crisis of awe passing into transcendent exaltation, kindred with the state which De Quincey describes when recalling the feelings wrought in his childish brain by the loss of his sister. It set the child-man asking why? first sign of a dawning intelligence; it told him in familiar language that we lie on the borders of the unknown; it opened before him the infinite spaces of hope and fear; it shattered to pieces the dull round of the food-seeking present, and built up out of the ruins the perception of a past and a future. It was the symbol of a human oneness with the coming and going of day and night, summer and winter, the rising and receding tide. It caused even the rudest of men to speak lower, to tread more softly, revealing to him unawares the angel Reverence. And above all, it wounded the heart of man. M. Renan says with great truth, "Le grand agent de la marche du monde, c'est la douleur." What poetry owes to the bread of sorrow has never been better told than by the Greek folk-singer, who condenses it into one brief sentence: "Songs are the words spoken by those who suffer."

The influence of death on the popular imagination is shown in those ballads of the supernatural of which folk-poetry offers so great an abundance as to make choice difficult. One of the most powerful as well as the most widely diffused of the people's ghost stories is that which treats of the persecuted child whose mother comes out of her grave to succour him. There are two or three variants of this among the Czech songs. A child aged eighteen months loses his mother. As soon as he is old enough to understand about such things, he asks his father what he has done with her? "Thy mother sleeps a heavy sleep, no one will wake her; she lies in the graveyard hard by the gate." When the child hears that, he runs to the graveyard. He loosens the earth with a big pin and pushes it aside with his little finger. Then he cries mournfully, "Ah! mother, little mother, say one little word to me!" "My child, I cannot," the mother replies, "my head is weighed down with clay; on my heart is a stone which burns like fire; go home little one, there you have another mother." "Ah!" rejoins he, "she is not good like you were. When she gives me bread she turns it thrice; when you gave it me you spread it with butter. When she combs my hair she makes my head bleed; when you combed my hair, mother, you fondled it. When she bathes my feet she bruises them against the side of the basin; when you bathed them you kissed them. When she washes my shirt she loads me with curses; you used to sing whilst you washed." The mother answers: "Go back to the house, my child, to-morrow I will come for you." The child goes back to the house and lies down in his bed. "Ah! father, my little father, make ready my winding-sheet, my soul now belongs to God, my body to the grave, to the grave near my mother—how glad her heart will be!" One day he was ill, the second he died, the third day they buried him. The effect is heightened by the interval placed between the mother's death and the child's awakening to his own forlorn condition. When the mother died he was too young to think or to grieve. He did not know that she was gone until he missed her. Only by degrees, after years of harsh treatment, borne with the patience of a child or a dumb animal, he began to feel intuitively rather than to remember that it had not been always so—that he had once been loved. Then, going straight to the point with the terrible accusative power that lies in children, he said to the father, "What have you done with my mother?" He had been able to live and to suffer until he was old enough to think; when he thought, he died. Here we have an instance, one of the many that exist, of a motive which, having recurred again and again in folk-poetry, gets handled at last by a master-poet, who gives it enduring shape and immortality. Victor Hugo may or may not have known the popular legend. It is most likely that he did not know it. Yet, stripped of the marvellous, and modified in certain secondary points of construction, the story is the story of "Petit Paul," little Paul, the child of modern France, who takes company with Dante's Anselmuccio and Shakespeare's Arthur, and who with them will live in the pity of all time. The Ruthenes affirm that it was Christ who bade the child seek his mother's grave. The Provençal folk-poet begins his tale: "You shall hear the complaint of three very little children." The mother of these children was dead, the father had married again. The new wife brought a hard time for the children, and the day came when they were like to starve. The littlest begged for a bit of bread, and he got a kick which threw him to the ground. Then the biggest of the brothers said, "Get up and let us go to our mother in the graveyard; she will give us bread." They set out at once; on their way they met Jesus Christ.

Et ount anetz, mes angis,

Mes angis tant petits?

"Where are you going, my angels, my so very small angels?" "We go to the graveyard to find our mother." Jesus Christ tells the mother to come forth and give her children food. "How would you have me come forth, when there is no strength left in me?" He answers that her strength shall come back to her for seven years. Now, as the end of the seven years drew near, she was always sobbing and sighing, and the children asked why it was. "I weep, my children, because I have to go away from you." "Weep no more, mother, we will all go together; one shall carry the hyssop, another will take the taper, the last will hold the book. We will go home singing." The Provençal poet does not tell us what happened when the resuscitated wife came back to her former abode; we have to go to Scandinavia for an account of that. Dyring the Dane went to an island and wed a fair maiden. For seven years they dwelt together and were blessed with children; but while the youngest born was still a helpless babe, Death stalked through the land and carried off the young wife in his clutches. Dyring went to another island and married a girl who was bad and spiteful. He brought her home to his house, and when she reached the door the six little children were there crying. She thrust them aside with her foot, she gave them no ale and no bread; she said, "You shall suffer thirst and hunger." She took from them their blue cushions, and said, "You shall sleep on straw." She took from them their wax candles, and said, "You shall stay in the dark." In the evening, very late, the children cried, and their mother heard them under the ground. She listened as she lay in her shroud, and thought to herself, "I must go to my little children." She begged our Lord so hard to let her go, that her prayer was granted. "Only you must be back when the cock crows." She lifted her weary limbs, the grave gaped, she passed through the village, the dogs howled as she passed, throwing up their noses in the air. When she got to the house, she saw her eldest daughter on the threshold. "Why are you standing there, my dear daughter? Where are your brothers and sisters?" The daughter knew her not. She said her mother was fair and blithe, her face was white and pink. "How can I be fair and blithe? I am dead, my face is pale. How can I be white and pink, when I have been all this time in my winding-sheet?" Answering thus, the mother hastened to her little children's chamber. She found them with tears running down their cheeks. She brushed the clothes of one, she tidied the hair of the second, she lifted the third from the floor, she comforted the fourth, the fifth she set on her knee as though she were fain to suckle it. To the eldest girl she said, "Go and tell Dyring to come here." And when he came she cried in wrath, "I left you ale and bread, and my little ones hunger; I left you blue cushions, and my little ones lie on straw; I left you waxen candles, and my little ones are in the dark. Woe betide you, if there be cause I should return again! Behold the red cock crows, the dead fly underground. Behold the black cock crows, heaven's doors are thrown wide. Behold the white cock crows, I must begone." So saying she went, and was seen no more. Ever after that night each time Dyring and his wife heard the dogs bark they gave the children ale and bread; each time they heard the dogs bay they were seized with dread of the dead woman; each time they heard the dogs howl they trembled lest she should come back. Two universal beliefs are introduced into this variant: the disappearance of the dead at cock crow, and the connection of the howling of dogs with death or the dead. The last is a superstition which still obtains a wide acceptance even among educated people. I was speaking of it lately to an English officer, who stated that he had twice heard the death howl, once while on duty in Ireland, and once, if I remember right, in India. It was, he said, totally unlike any other noise produced by a dog. I observed that all noises sound singular when the nerves are strained by painful expectancy; but he answered that in his own case his feelings were not involved, as the death which occurred, in one instance at least, was that of a perfect stranger.

The interpretation of dreams as a direct intercourse with the spiritual world is not usual in folk-lore; the people hardly see the need of placing the veil of sleep between mortal eyes and ghostly appearances. In a Bulgarian song, however, a sleeping girl speaks with her dead mother. Militza goes down into the little garden where the white and red roses are in bloom. She is weary, and she is soon asleep. A small fine rain begins to fall, the wind rustles in the leaves; Militza sighs, and having sighed, she awakes. Then she upbraids the rain and the wind: "Whistle no more, O wind; thou, O rain, descend no more; for in my dreams I found my mother. Rain, may thy fount be dried; mayst thou be for ever silent, O wind: ye have taken me from the counsel my mother gave me." The few lines thus baldly summarized make up, as it seems to me, a little masterpiece of delicate conception and light workmanship: one which would surprise us from the lips of a letterless poet, were there not proof that no touch is so light and so sure as that of the artificer untaught in our own sense—the man or the woman who produces the intricate filigree, the highly wrought silver, the wood carving, the embroidery, the lace, the knitted wool rivalling the spider's web, the shawl with whose weft and woof a human life is interwoven.

I have only once come upon the case of a father who returns to take care of his offspring. Mr Chu, a worthy Chinese gentleman, revisited this earth as a disembodied spirit to guard and teach his little boy Wei. When Wei reached the age of twenty-two, and took his doctor's degree, his father, Mr Chu, finally vanished. As a general rule, the Chinese consider the sight of his former surroundings to be the worst penalty that can befall a soul. Mr Herbert Giles, in his fascinating work on the Liao-Chai of P'u Sing-Ling, gives a full account of the terrible See-one's-home terrace as represented in the fifth court of Purgatory in the Taoist Temples. Good souls, or even those who have done partly good and partly evil, will never stand thereon. The souls of the wicked only see their homes as if they were near them: they see their last wishes disregarded, everything upside down, their substance squandered, the husband prepares to take a new wife, strangers possess the old estate, in their misery the dead man's family curse him, his children become corrupt, lands are gone, the house is burnt, the wife sees her husband tortured, the husband sees his wife stricken down with mortal disease; friends forget: "some perhaps for the sake of bygone times may stroke the coffin and let fall a tear, departing with a cold smile." In the West, this gloomy creed is perhaps hinted at in the French proverb, "Les morts sont bien mort." But Western thought at its best, at its highest, imagines differently. It imagines that the most gracious privilege of immortal spirits is that of beholding those beloved of them in mortal life—

I am still near,

Watching the smiles I prized on earth,

Your converse mild, your blameless mirth.

Happy and serene optimism!

The ghosts of folk-lore return not only to succour the innocent, they come back also to convict the guilty. The avenging ghost shows himself in all kinds of strange and uncanny ways rather than in his habit as he lived. He comes in animal or vegetable shape; or perhaps he uses the agency of some inanimate object. In the Faroe Isles there is a story of a girl whose sister pushed her into the sea out of jealousy. The blue waves cast ashore her body, which was found by two pilgrims, who made the arms into a harp, and the flaxen locks into strings. Then they went and played the harp at the wedding feast of the murderess and the dead girl's betrothed. The first string said, "The bride is my sister." The second string said, "The bride caused my death." The third string said, "The bridegroom is my betrothed." The harp's notes swelled louder and louder, and the guilty bride fell sick unto death; before the pilgrims had done playing, her heart broke. This is much the same story as the "Twa Sisters of Binnorie." A Slovack legend describes two musicians who, as they were travelling together, noticed a fine plane tree; and one said to the other, "Let us cut it down, it is just the thing to make a violin of; the violin will be equally yours and mine; we will play on it by turn." At the first blow the tree sighed; at the second blow blood spurted out; at the third blow the tree began to talk. It said: "Musicians, fair youths, do not cut me down; I am not a tree, I am made of flesh and blood; I am a lovely girl of the neighbouring town; my mother cursed me while I drew water—while I drew water and chatted with my friend. 'Mayst thou change into a plane tree with broad leaves,' said she. Go ye, musicians, and play before my mother." So they betook themselves to the mother's door and played a dirge over her child. "Play not, musicians, fair youths," she entreated. "Rend not my heart by your playing. I have enough of woe in having lost my daughter. Hapless the mother who curses her children!" The well-known German tale of the juniper tree belongs to the same class. A beautiful little boy is killed by his step-mother, who serves him up as a dish of meat to his father. The father eats in ignorance, and throws away the bones, which are gathered up by the little half-sister, who puts them into her best silk handkerchief and buries them under a juniper tree. Presently a bird of gay plumage perches on the tree, and whistles as it flits from branch to branch—

Min moder de mi slach't,

Min fader de mi att,

Min swester de Marleenken

Söcht alle mine Beeniken,

Und bindt sie in een syden Dook

Legst unner den Machandelboom;

Ky witt! ky witt! Ach watt en schön vagel bin ich!

—a rhyme which Goethe puts into the mouth of Gretchen in prison. In the German story the step-mother's brains are knocked out by the fall of a mill-stone, and the bird-boy is restored to human form; but in a Scotch variant the last event does not take place. It may have been thrown in by some narrator who had a weakness for a plot which ends well. All these wonder-tales had probably an original connection with a belief in the transmigration of souls. In truth, the people's Märchen are rooted nearly always on some article of ancient faith: that is why they have so long a life. Faith vitalizes poetry or legend or art; and what once lived takes a great time to die. Now that the beliefs which fostered them have gone into the lumber-room of disused religions, the old wonder-tales still have a freshness and a horror which cannot be found even in the best of brand-new "made-up" stories.

Another reason why the dead come back is to fulfil a promise. The Greek mother of the Kleft song has nine sons and one only daughter. She bathes her in the darkness, her hair she combs in the light, she dresses her beneath the shining of the moon. A stranger from Bagdad has asked her in marriage, and Constantine, one of the sons, counsels his mother to give her to the stranger. "Thou art wont to be prudent, but in this thou art senseless," says the mother. "Who will bring her back to me if there be joy or sorrow?" Constantine gives her God as surety, and all the saints and martyrs, that if there be sorrow or joy he will bring her back. In two years all the nine sons die, and when it is Constantine's turn, the mother leans over his body and tears her hair. Fain would she have back her daughter Arete, and behold Constantine lies dead. At midnight Constantine gets up and goes to where his sister dwells, and bids Arete to follow him. She asks what has happened, but he tells her nothing. While they journey along the birds sing: "See you that lovely girl riding with the dead?" Then Arete asks her brother if he heard what the birds said. "They are only birds," he answers; "never mind them." She says her brother has such an odour of incense that it fills her with fear, "It is only," he says, "because we passed the evening in the chapel of St John." When they reach their home, the mother opens the portal and sees the dead and the living come in together, and her soul leaves her body. The motive of a ride with the dead, made familiar by the "Erl König" and Burgher's "Lenore," can be traced through endless variations in folk-poesy.

In the Swedish ballad of "Little Christina," a lover rises from his grave, not to carry off his beloved, but simply to console her. One night Christina hears light fingers tapping at her door; she opens it, and her dead betrothed comes in. She washes his feet with pure wine, and for a long while they speak together. Then the cocks begin to crow, and the dead get them underground. The young girl puts on her shoes and follows her betrothed through the wide forest. When they reach the graveyard, the fair hair of the young man begins to disappear. "See, maiden," he says, "how the moon has reddened all at once; even so, in a moment, thy beloved will vanish." She sits down on the tomb and says: "I shall remain here till the Lord calls me." Then she hears the voice of her betrothed saying to her: "Little Christina, go back to thy dwelling-place. Every time a tear falls from thine eyes my shroud is full of blood. Every time thy heart is gay, my shroud is full of rose leaves."

If the display of excessive grief is thus shown to be only grievous to the dead, yet they are held to be keenly sensible of a lack of due and decorous respect. Such respect they generally get from rough or savage natures, unless it be denied out of intentional scorn or enmity. There is a factory in England where common men are employed to manipulate large importations of bones for agricultural uses. Each cargo contains a certain quantity of bones which are very obviously human. These the workmen sort out, and when they have got a heap they bury it, and ask the manager to read over it some passages from the Burial Service. They do it of their own free will and initiative; were they hindered, they would very likely leave the works. Shall it be called foolish or sublime? Another curious instance of respect to the dead comes to my mind. On board ship two cannon balls are ordinarily sewed up with a body to sink it. Once a negro died at sea, and his fellows, negroes also, took him in a boat and rowed a long way to a place where they were to commit him to the deep. After a while the boat returned to the ship, still with its burden. The explanation was soon made. The negroes discovered that they had only one cannon ball, they had rowed back for the other. One would have been quite enough to answer all purposes; but it seemed to them disrespectful to their comrade to cheat him out of half his due.

The dead particularly object to people treading carelessly on their graves. So we learn from one of the songs of Greek outlawry.

All Saturday we held carouse, and far through Sunday night,

And on the Monday morn we found our wine expended quite.

To seek for more without delay the captain made me go;

I ne'er had seen nor known the way, nor had a guide to show.

And so through solitary roads and secret paths I sped,

Which to a little ivied church long time deserted led.

This church was full of tombs, and all by gallant men possest;

One sepulchre stood all alone, apart from all the rest.

I did not see it, and I trod above the dead man's bones,

And as from out the nether world came up a sound of groans.

What ails thee, sepulchre? why thus so deeply groan and sigh?

Doth the earth press, or the black stone weigh on thee heavily?

"Neither the earth doth press me down, nor black stone do me scath,

But I with bitter grief am wrung, and full of shame and wrath,

That thou dost trample on my head, and I am scorned in death.

Perhaps I was not also young, nor brave and stout in fight,

Nor wont as thou, beneath the moon, to wander through the night."

Egil Skallagrimson, after his son was drowned, resolved to let himself die of hunger. Thorgerd, his daughter, came to him and prayed hard of him that he would sing. Touched by her affection, he made an effort, gathered up his ideas, dressed them in images, expressed them in song; and as he sang, his regrets softened, and in the end his soul became so calm that he was satisfied to live. In this beautiful saga lies the secret of folk-elegies. The people find comfort in singing. A Czech maiden asks of the dark woods how they can be as green in winter as in summer; as for her, she cannot help vexing her heart. "But who would not weep in my place? Where is my father, my beloved father? The sandy plain is his winding-sheet. Where is my mother, my good mother? The grass grows over her. I have no brother and no sister, and they have taken away my friend." Of a certainty when she had sung, her vexed heart was lighter. "Seul a un synonym: mort." Yes, but he who sings is scarcely alone, even though there be only the waving pine woods to answer with a sigh. The most passionate laments of the Sclavonic race are for father and mother. If a Little Russian loses both his parents his despair is such that it often drives him forth a wanderer on the face of the earth. One so bereft cries out, "Dear mother, why didst thou suffer me to see the day? Why didst thou bring me into the world without obtaining for me by thy prayers a portion of its blessings? My father and my mother are dead, and with them my country. Why was I left a wretched orphan? Oh, could I find a being miserable as myself that we might sympathize one with the other!" The birth-ties of kindred are reckoned the only strong ones. Some Russian lines, translated by Mr Ralston, indicate the degrees of mourning:

There weeps his mother—as a river runs;

There weeps his sister—as a streamlet flows;

There weeps his youthful wife—as falls the dew;

The sun will rise and gather up the dew.

A Servian pesma illustrates the same idea. Young Tövo has the misfortune to break his arm. A doctor is fetched—no other than a Vila of the mountain. The wily sprite demands in guerdon for the cure the right hand of the mother, the sister's long hair, with the ribbons that bind it, the pearl necklace of the wife. Quickly the mother sacrifices her right hand, quickly the sister cuts off her much-prized braid, but the wife says, "Give up my white pearls that my father gave me? Not I!" The Vila waxes angry and poisons Tövo's blood. When he is dead three women fall "a-kookooing"—one groans without ceasing; one sobs at dawn and dusk; one weeps just now and then when it comes into her head so to do. As the cuckoo is supposed to be a sister mourning for her brother, kookooing has come to mean lamenting. The Servian girl who has lately lost her brother cannot hear the cuckoo's note without weeping. In popular poetry the love of sister for brother takes precedence even of the love of mother for child. Not only does Gudrun in the Elder Edda esteem the murder of her first lord, the god-like Sigurd, to be of less importance than that of her brothers, but also to avenge their deaths, she has no scruple in slaying both her second husband and her own sons. A Bulgarian ballad shows in still more striking light the relative value set on the lives of child and brother. There was a certain man named Negul, whose head was in danger. The folk-poet is careful to express no sort of censure upon his hero, but the boasts he is made to utter are sufficient guides to his character. Great numbers of Turks has he put to flight, and yet more women has he killed of those who would not follow him meekly as his wives. "And now," he adds plaintively, "a misfortune has befallen me which I have done nothing at all to deserve." His sister Milenka hears him bemoaning his fate, and at once she says to him, "Brother Negul, Negul, my brother, do not disturb yourself, do not distress yourself; I have nine sons, nine sons and one daughter; the youngest of all is Lalo; him will I sacrifice to save you; I will sacrifice him so that you may remain to me." This was the promise of Milenka. Then she hastened to her own home and prepared hot meats and set flasks of golden wine wherewith to feast her sons. "Eat and drink together," she said, "and kiss one another's hands, for Lalo is going away to be groomsman to his Uncle Negul. Let your mother see you all assembled, and serve you each in turn with ruddy wine and with smoking viands." For the others she did not wholly fill the glass, but Lalo's glass she filled to the brim. Meanwhile Elka, Lalo's sister, made ready his clothes for the journey; and as she busied about it, the little girl cried because Lalo was going to be groomsman, and they had not asked her to be bridesmaid. Lalo said to Elka, "Elka, my little only sister, do not cry so, sister; do not be so vexed; we are nine brothers, and one of these days you will surely act as bridesmaid." The words were hardly spoken when the headsmen reached the door. They took Lalo, the groomsman, and they chopped off his head in place of his Uncle Negul's.

A new and different world is entered when we follow the folk-poet upon the wrestling-ground of Death and Love. If I have judged rightly, there were songs of death before there were any other love songs than those of the nightingale; but the folk-poet was still young when he learnt to sing of love, and the love poet found out early that his lyre was incomplete without the string of death. In all folk-poetry can be plainly heard that music of love and death which may be said almost to have been the dominant note that sounded through the literature of the ages of romance. Sometimes the victory is given to death, sometimes to love; in one song love, while yielding, conquers. Folk-poetry has not anything more instinct with the quality of intensity than is this "Last Request" of a Greek robber-lover—

When thou shalt hear that I am ill,

O my well-beloved! he said,

O come to me, and quickly come,

Or thou wilt find me dead.

And when that thou hast reached the house,

And the great gates passed through,

Then, O my well-beloved, the braids

Of thy bright hair undo.

And to my mother say straightway,

Tell me, where is your son?

My son is lying on his bed

In his chamber all alone.

Then mount the stairs, O my well-beloved,

And come your lover anigh,

And smooth my pillow that I may

Raise me a little high,

And hold my head up in thy hands

Till flies away my soul.

And when thou seest the priest arrive,

And dress him in his stole,

Then place, my well-beloved, a kiss

On my lips pale and cold;

And when four youths shall lift me up,

And on their shoulders hold,

Then shalt thou, O my well-beloved,

Cast at them many a stone.

And when they reach thy neighbourhood

And by thy house pass on,

Then, O my well-beloved, thy hair,

Thy golden tresses cut;

And when they reach the church's gate,

And there my coffin put,

Then as the hen her feathers plucks,

So pluck thy hair for me.

And when my dirges all are done,

And lights extinguished be,

Then shall my heart, O well-beloved,

Still be possessed of thee.

We hardly notice the adventitious part of it—the ancient custom of tearing off the hair, the strange stone-casting at the youths who represent Charon; our attention is absorbed by what is the essence of the song: passion which has burned itself into pure fire. Greek folk-poetry shows a blending together of southern emotions with an imaginative fervour, a prophetic power that is rather of the East than of the South. No Tuscan ploughman, for instance, could seize the idea of the Greek folk-poet of possessing his living love in death. If the Tuscan thinks of a union in the grave, it can only be attained by the one who remains joining the one who is gone—

O friendly soil,

Soil that doth hold my love in thine embrace,

Soon as for me shall end life's war and toil

Beneath thy sod I too would have a place;

Where my love is, there do I long to be,

Where now my heart is buried far from me—

Yes, where my love is gone I long to go,

Robbed of my heart I bear too deep a woe.

This stringer of pretty conceits fails to convince us that he is very much in earnest in his wish to die. Speaking in the sincerity of prose, the Tuscan says, "Ogni cosa è meglio che la morte." He does not believe in the nothingness of life. In his worst troubles he still feels that all his faculties, all his senses, are made for pleasure. Death is to him the affair of a not cheerful religious ceremony—a cross borne before a black draped bier, and bells tolling dolefully.

I hear Death's step, I see him at my side,

I feel his bony fingers clasp me round;

I see the church's door is open wide,

And for the dead I hear the knell resound.

I see the cross and the black pall outspread;

Love, thou dost lead me whither lie the dead!

I see the cross, the winding-sheet I see;

Love, to the graveyard thou art leading me!

Going further south, a stage further is reached in crude externality of vision. People of the South are the only born realists. To them that comes natural which in others is either affectation or the fruits of what the French call l'amour du laid—a morbid love of the hideous, such as marred the fine genius of Baudelaire. At Naples death is a matter of corruption naked in the sunlight. When the Neapolitan takes his mandoline amongst the tombs he unveils their sorry secrets, not because he gloats over them, but because the habit of a reserve of speech is entirely undeveloped in him. He dares to sing thus of his lost love—

Her lattice ever lit no light displays.

My Nella! can it be that you are ill?

Her sister from the window looks and says:

"Your Nella in the grave lies cold and still.

Ofttimes she wept to waste her life unwed,

And now, poor child, she sleeps beside the dead."

Go to the church and lift the winding-sheet,

Gaze on my Nella's face—how changed, alas!

See 'twixt those lips whence issued flowers so sweet

Now loathsome worms (ah! piteous sight!) do pass.

Priest, let it be your care, and promise me,

That evermore her lamp shall lighted be.

The song beats with the pulses of the people's life—the life of a people swift in gesture, in action, in living, in dying: always in a hurry, as if one must be quick for the catastrophe is coming. They are all here: the lover waiting in the street for some sign or word; the girl leaning out of window to tell her piece of news; the "poor child" who had drunk of the lava stream of love; the dead lying uncoffined in the church to be gazed upon by who will; the priest to whom are given those final instructions: pious, and yet how uncomforting, how unilluminated by hope or even aspiration! Here there is no thought of reunion. A kind-hearted German woman once tried to console a young Neapolitan whose lover was dead, by saying that they might meet in Paradise. "In Paradise?" she answered, opening her large black eyes; "Ah! signora, in Paradise people do not marry."

The coming back or reappearance of a lover, in whose absence his beloved has died, is a subject that has been made use of by the folk-poets of every country, and nothing can be more characteristic of the nationalities to which they belong than the divergences which mark their treatment of it. Northern singers turn the narrative of the event into half a fairy tale. On the banks of the Moldau we are introduced to a joyous youth, returning with glad steps to his native village. "My pretty girls, my doves, is my friend cutting oats with you?" he asks of a group of girls working in the fields near his home. "Only yesterday," they reply, "his friend was buried." He begs them to tell him by which path they bore her away. It is a road edged with rosemary; everybody knows it—it leads to the new cemetery. Thither he goes, thrice he wanders round the place, the third time he hears a voice crying, "Who is it treads on my grave and breaks the rest of the dead?" "It is I, thy friend," he says, and he bids her rise up and look on him. She says she cannot, she is too weak, her heart is lifeless, her hands and feet are like stones. But the gravedigger has left his spade hard by; with it her friend can shovel away the earth that holds her down. He does what she tells him; when the earth is lifted he beholds her stretched out at full length, a frozen maiden crowned with rosemary. He asks to whom has she bequeathed his gifts. She answers that her mother has them; he must go and beg them of her. Then shall he throw the little scarf upon a bush, and there will be an end to his love. And the silver ring he shall cast into the sea, and there will be an end to his grief. On the shores of the Wener it is Lord Malmstein who wakes before dawn from a dream that his beloved's heart is breaking. "Up, up, my little page, saddle the grey; I must know how it fares with my love." He mounts the horse and gallops into the forests. Of a sudden two little maids stand in his path; one wears a dress of blue, and hails him with the words: "God keep you, Lord Malmstein; what bale awaits you!" The other is dight in red, and of her Lord Malmstein asks, "Who is ill, and who is dead?" "No one is ill, no one is dead, save only the betrothed of Malmstein." He makes haste to reach the village; on the way he meets the bier of his betrothed. Swiftly he leaps from the saddle; he pulls from off his finger rings of fine gold, and throws them to the gravedigger—"Delve a grave deep and wide, for therein we will walk together." His face turns red and white, and he deals a mortal blow at his heart. This Swedish Malmstein not only figures as the reappearing lover; he is also one of that familiar pair whom death unites. In an ancient Romansch ballad the story is simply an episode of peasant life. A young Engadiner girl is forced by her father to marry a man of the village of Surselva, but all the while her troth is plighted to a youth from the village of Schams. On the road to Surselva the lover joins the bride and bridegroom unknown to the latter. When they reach the place the people declare that they have never seen so fair a woman as the youthful bride. Her husband's father and mother greet her saying, "Daughter, be thou welcome to our house!" But she answers, "No, I have never been your daughter, nor do I hope ever to be; for the time is near when I must die." Then her brothers and sisters greet her saying, "O sister, be thou welcome to our house!" "No," she says, "I have never been your sister, nor do I ever hope to be; for the time comes when I must die. Only one kindness I ask of you, give me a room where I may rest." They lead her to her chamber, they try to comfort her with sweet words; but the more they would befriend her, the more does the young bride turn her mind away from this world. Her lover is by her side, and to him she says, "O my beloved, greet my father and my mother; tell them that perhaps they have rejoiced their hearts, but sure it is they have broken mine." She turns her face to the wall and her soul returns to God. "O my beloved," cries the lover, "as thou diest, and diest for me, for thee will I gladly die." He throws himself upon the bed, and his soul follows hers. As the clock struck two they carried her to the grave, as the clock struck three they came for him; the marriage bells rang them to their rest; the chimes of Schams answering back the chimes of Surselva. From the grave mound of the girl grew a camomile plant, from the grave mound of the youth a plant of musk; and for the great love they bore one another even the flowers twined together and embraced.

Uoi, i sül tömbel da quella bella

Craschiva sü üna flur da chiaminella;

Uoi, i sül tömbel da que bel mat

Craschiva sü üna flur nusch muschiat;

Per tant grond bain cha queus dus as leivan,

Parfin las fluors insemmel as brancleivan.

It is a sign of a natural talent for democracy when the people like better to tell stories about themselves than to discuss the fortunes of prince or princess. The devoted lovers are more often to be looked for in the immediate neighbourhood of a court. So it is in the ballad of Count Nello of Portugal. Count Nello brings his horse to bathe; while the horse drinks, the Count sings. It was already very dark—the King could not recognise him. The poor Infanta knew not whether to laugh or to cry. "Be quiet, my daughter; listen and thou wilt hear a beautiful song. It is an angel singing, or the siren in the sea." "No, it is no angel in heaven, nor is it the siren of the sea; it is Count Nello, my father, he who fain would wed me." "Who speaks of Count Nella who dare name him, the rebel vassal whom I have exiled?" "My Lord, mine only is the fault; you should punish me alone; I cannot live without him; it is I who have made him come." "Hold thy peace, traitress; before day dawns thou shalt see his head cut off." "The headsman who slays him may prepare for me too; there where you dig his grave dig mine also." For whom are the bells tolling? Count Nello is dead; the Infanta is like to die. The two graves are open; behold! they lay the Count near the porch of the church and the Infanta at the foot of the altar. On one grave grows a cypress, on the other an orange tree; one grows, the other grows; their branches join and kiss. The king, when he hears of it, orders them both to be cut down. From the cypress flows noble blood, from the orange tree blood royal; from one flies forth a dove, from the other a wood-pigeon. When the king sits at table the birds perch before him. "Ill luck upon their fondness," he cries, "ill luck upon their love! Neither in life nor in death have I been able to divide them." The musk and the camomile of Switzerland, the cypress and the orange tree of Portugal, are the cypress and the reed of the Greek folk-song, the thorn and olive of the Norman chanson, the rose and the briar of the English ballad, the vine and the rose of the Tristram and Iseult story. Through the world they tell their tale—

Amor condusse noi ad una morte.

The death of heroes has provided an inexhaustible theme for folk-poets. The chief or partisan leader had his complement in the skald or bard or roving ballad-singer; if the one acted, turned tribes into nations, cut out history, the other sang, published his fame, gave his exploits to the future, preserved to his people the remembrance of his dying words. The poetry of hero-worship, beginning on Homeric heights, descends to the "lytell gestes" of all sorts and conditions of more or less respectable and patriotic outlaws and condottieri, whose "passing" is often the most honourable point in their career. On the principle which has been followed—that of letting the folk-poet speak for himself, and show what are his ideas and his impressions after his own manner and in his own language—I will take three death scenes from amongst the less known of those recorded in popular verse. The first is Scandinavian. What ails Hjalmar the Icelander? Why is his face so pale? The Norse Warrior answers: "Sixteen wounds have I, and my armour is shattered. All things grow black in my sight; I reel in walking; the bloody sword of Agantyr has pierced my heart. Had I five houses in the fields I could not dwell in one of them; I must abide at Samsa, hopeless and mortally wounded. At Upsal, in the halls of Josur, many Jarls quaff joyously the foaming ale, many Jarls exchange hot words; but as for me, I am here in this island, struck down by the point of the sword. The white daughter of Hilmer accompanied my steps to Aganfik beyond the reefs; her words are come true, for she said I should return no more. Draw off my finger the ring of ruddy gold, bear it to my youthful Ingebrog, it will remind her that she will see me never more. In the east upsoars the raven; after him the mightier eagle wings his way. I will be meat for the eagle and my heart's blood his drink." One backward look to all that was the joy of his life—the feast, the fight, the woman he loved—and then a calm facing of the end. This is how the Norseman died. The Greek hero, who dies peaceably in the ripeness of old age, meets his doom with even less trouble of spirit—

The sun sank down behind the hill,

And Dimos faintly said,

'Go, children, fetch your evening meal—

The water and the bread.

Thou, Lamprakis, my brother's son,

Come hither, by me stand,

And arm me with my weapons,

And be captain of the band.

And, children, take my dear old sword

That I no more shall sway,

And cut the green boughs from the trees

And there my body lay;

And hither bring a priestly man

To whom I may confess,

That I may tell him all my sins,

And he forgive and bless.

For thirty years a soldier,

Twenty years a kleft was I;

Now death o'ertakes and seizes me,

'Tis finished, I must die.

And be ye sure ye make my grave

Of ample height and large,

That in it I may stand upright,

Or lie my gun to charge.

And to the right a lattice make,

A passage for the day,

Where the swallow, bringing springtide,

May dart about and play,

And the nightingale, sweet singer,

Tell the happy month of May.

The slight natural touches—the eagle soaring against the sunrise, the nightingale singing through the May nights—suggest an intuition of the will-of-the-wisp affinity between nature and human chances which seems for ever on the point of being seized, but which for ever eludes the mental grasp. We think of the "brown bird" in the noble "Funeral Song" of one who would have been a magnificent folk-poet, had he not learnt to write and read—Walt Whitman.

My third specimen is a Piedmontese ballad composed probably about a hundred and fifty years ago, and still very popular. Count Nigra ascertained the existence of eight or more variants. A German soldier, known in Italy as the Baron Lodrone, took arms under the house of Savoy, in whose service he presently died. "In Turin," begins the ballad, "counts and barons and noble dames mourn for the death of the Baron Lodrone." The king went to Cuneo to visit his dying soldier; drums and cannons greeted his approach. He spoke kind words to the sick man: "Courage, thou wilt not die, and I will give thee the supreme command." "There is no commander who can stand against death," answered the baron. Now Lodrone was a Protestant, and when the king was convinced that he must die, he exhorted him to conversion, saying that he himself would stand his sponsor. Lodrone replied that that could not be. The king did not insist; he only asked him where he would be buried, and promised him a sepulchre of gold. He answered—

Mi lasserü për testament

Ch 'a mi sotero an val d' Lüserna,

An val d' Lüserna a m sotraran

Dova l me cör s'arposa tan!

He does not care for a golden sepulchre, but he "leaves for testament" that his body may lie in Val Luserna, "where my heart rests so well!" The valley of Luserna was the seat of the Vaudois faith in the "alpine mountains cold," watered with martyr blood only a little while before Lodrone lived. To read these four simple lines after the fantasia of wild or whimsical guesses, passionate longing, unresisted despair, insatiable curiosity, that death has been seen to create or inspire, is like going out of a public place with its multiform and voluble presentment of men and things into the aisles of a small church which would lie silent but that unseen hands pass over the organ keys.

NATURE IN FOLK-SONGS.

Nature, like music, does not initially make us think, it makes us feel. A midnight scene in the Alps, a sunrise on the Mediterranean, suspends at the moment of contemplating it all thought in pure emotion. Afterwards, however, thought comes back and asks for a reason for the emotion that has been felt. Man at an early age began to try and explain, or give a tangible shape, to the feelings wrought in him by Nature. In the first place he called the things that he saw gods, "because the things are beautiful that are seen." Later on, seers and myth-makers resigned their birthright into the hands of poets, who became henceforth the interpreters between nature and man. A small piece of this succession fell away from the great masters of the world's song, and was picked up almost unconsciously by the obscure and nameless folk-singer. Comparative folk-lore has shown that men have everywhere the same customs, the same superstitions, the same games. The study of folk-songs will go far to show that if they have not likewise a complete community of taste and sentiment, yet even in these, the finer fibres of their being, there is less of difference and more of analogy than has been hitherto supposed. Folk-songs prove, for instance, that the modern unschooled man is not so utterly ignorant of natural beauty as many of us have imagined him to be. Only we must not go from the extreme of expecting nothing to the extreme of expecting too much; it has to be borne in mind that at best folk-poesy is rather the stammering speech of children than a mature eloquence.

It is a common idea that, until the other day, mountains were looked upon with positive aversion. Still we know that there were always men who felt the power of the hills: the men who lived in the hills. When they were kept too long in the plain without hope of return they sickened and died; when a vivid picture of their mountains was of a sudden brought up before them, they lost control over their actions. By force of association the sound of the Kuhreihen could doubtless give the Switzer a vision of the white peak, the milky torrent, the chalet with slanting roof, the cows tripping down the green Alp to their night quarters. It is disappointing to find that the words accompanying the famous cow-call are as a rule mere nonsense. The first observation which the genuine folk-poet makes about mountains is the sufficiently self-evident one, that they form a wall between himself and the people on the further side. The old Pyrenean balladist seized the political significance of this: "When God created those mountains," he said, "He did not mean that men should cross them." Very often the mountain wall is spoken of as a barrier which separates lovers. The Gascon peasants have an adaptation of Gaston Phoebus' romance:—

Aqueros mountines

Qui ta haoutes soun,

M'empechen de bede

Mas arnous oun soun.

In Bohemia the simple countryman poetises after much the same fashion as the Gascon cavalier: "Mountain, mountain, thou art very high! My friend, thou art far off, far beyond the mountains. Our love will fade yet more and yet more; there is nothing left for me; in this world no pleasantness remains." Another Czech singer laments that he is not where his thought is; if only the mountains did not stand between them, he would see his beloved walking in the garden and plucking blue flowers. He tries what a prayer will do: "Mountains, black mountains, step aside, so I may get my good friend for wife." In similar terms the native of Friuli begs the dividing range to stoop so he may look upon his love. Among Italian folk-poets the Friulian is foremost as a lover of the greater heights; he turns to them habitually in his moments of poetic inspiration, and, as he says, their echoes repeat his sighs. It must be admitted that the Tuscan, on the contrary, feels small sympathy with high mountains; if he speaks of one he is careful to call it aspra, or rough and bitter. But he yields to no man in his delight in the lesser hills, the be' poggioli of his fair birthland. Even if an intervening hillock divides him from his beloved he speaks of the barrier tenderly rather than sadly: "O sun, thou that goest over the hill-top, do me a kindness if thou canst—greet my love whom I have not seen to-day. O sun, thou that goest over the pear-trees, greet those black eyes. O sun, thou that goest over the small ash-trees, greet those beautiful eyes!" A maiden sings to herself, "I see what I see and I see not what I would; I see the leaves flying in the air and I do not see my love turn back from the hill-top. I do not see him turn back.... that beautiful face has gone over the hill." A youth tells all his story in these few words: "As I passed over the mountain-crest thy beautiful name came into my mind; I fell upon my knees and I joined my hands, and to have left thee seemed a sin. I fell upon my knees on the hard stones; may our love come back as of yore!" These are pure love-songs; not by any means descriptions of scenery, and yet how much of the Tuscan landscape lives in them!

Almost the only folk-song which is avowedly descriptive of a mountain, comes from South Greenland:—

The great Koonak Mount yonder south I do behold it. The great Koonak Mount yonder south I regard it. The shining brightness yonder south I contemplate. Outside of Koonak it is expanding; the same that Koonak towards the sea-side doth encompass. Behold how yonder south they tend to beautify each other; while from the sea-side it is enveloped in sheets still changing; from the sea-side it is enveloped to mutual embellishment.

At the first reading all this may seem incoherent; at the second or third we begin to see the scene gradually rising before us; the masses of sea-born cloud sweeping on and up at dawn or sunset, till, finding their passage barred, they enwrap the obstacle in folds of golden vapour. It is singular that the Eskimo is incessantly gazing southwards; can it be that he, too, is dimly sensible of what a great writer has called "la fatigue du Nord"?

Incidental mention of the varying aspects of peak and upland is common enough in popular songs. The Bavarian peasant notices the clearness of the heights while mist hangs over the valley:—

Im Thal ist der Nebel

Auf der Alm is schon klar ...

The Basque observes the "misty summits;" the Greek sees the cloud hurrying to the heights "like winged messengers." There is the closest intimacy between the Greek and his mountains. When he has won a victory for freedom, they cry aloud, "God is great!" When he is in sorrow he pines for them as for the society of friends: "Why am I not near the hills? Why have I not the mountains to keep me company?" A sick Kleft cries to the birds, "Birds, shall I ever be cured? Birds, shall I recover my strength?" To which the birds reply just as might a fashionable physician who recommends his patient to try Pontresina: "If thou wouldst be cured, if thou wouldst have thy wounds close up, go thou to the heights of Olympus, to the beautiful uplands where the strong man never suffers, where the suffering regain their strength." This fine figure of speech also occurs in a Kleft song: "The plains thirst for water, the mountains thirst for snow."

The effect of light on his native ice-fields has not escaped the Switzer: "The sun shines on the glacier, and in the heavens shine the stars; O thou, my chiefest joy, how I love thee!" A Czech balladist describes two chieftains travelling towards the sunrise, with mountains to the right and to the left, on whose summit stands the dawn. Again, he represents a band of warriors halting on the spurs of the forest, while before them lies Prague, silent and asleep, with the Veltava shrouded in morning mist; beyond, the mountains turn blue; beyond the mountains the east is illuminated. In Bohemia mountains are spoken of as blue or grey or shadowy; in Servia they are invariably called green. Servians and Bulgarians cannot conceive a mountain that is not a wood or a wood that is not a mountain; with them the two words mean one and the same thing. The charm and beauty of the combination of hill and forest are often dwelt upon in the Balkan brigand songs; outlaws and their poets have been among the keenest appreciators of nature. Who thinks of Robin Hood apart from the greenwood tree? Who but has smelt the very fragrance of the woods as he said over the lines?—

"In somer when the shawes be sheyn

And leves be large and long,

Hit is full merry in feyre foreste

To here the foulys song."

The Sclav or semi-Sclav bandit has not got the high moral qualities of our "most gentle theefe," but, like him, he has suffered the heat, the cold, the hunger, the fatigue of a life in the good greenwood, and, like him, he has tasted its joys. Take the ballad called the "Wintering of the Heidukes." Three friends sit drinking together in the mountains under the trees; they sip the ruddy wine, and discuss what they shall do in the coming winter, when the leaves have fallen and only the naked forest is left. Each decides where he will go, and the last one says: "So soon as the sad winter is passed, when the forest is clad again in leaves and the earth in grass and flowers, when the birds sing in the bushes on the banks of the Save and the wolves are heard in the hills—then shall we meet as to-day." Spring returns, the forest is decked again with leaves, the black earth with flowers and grass, the bird sings in the bush, the wolves howl on the rocky heights; two of the friends meet at the trysting place—the third comes not; he has been slain. This is only one Pesma out of a hundred in which the mountain background is faithfully sketched. Sometimes the forest figures as a personage. The Balkan mountaineer more than half believes that as he loves it, so does it love him. The instinct which insists that "love exempteth nothing loved from love" has been a great myth-germinator, and when myths die out, it still finds some niche in the mind of man wherein to abide. It may seem foolish when applied to inanimate objects; it must seem false in its human application: but reasoning will not kill it. Is there some truth unperceived behind the apparent fallacy? The Balkan brigand cares little for such speculations; all that he tells us is that when he speaks to the greenwood, it most surely answers him in a soft low voice. The Bulgarian "Farewell of Liben the brave" is a good specimen of the dialogues between the forest and its wild denizens. Standing on the top of the Hodja Balkan, Liben cries aloud, "Forest, O green forest, and ye cool waters! dost thou remember, O forest, how often I have roamed about thee with my following of young comrades bearing aloft my red banner?" Many are the mothers, the wives, and the little orphans whom Liben has made desolate so that they curse him. Now must he bid farewell to the mountain, for he is going home to his mother who will affiance him to the daughter of the Pope Nicholas. "The forest speaks to no one, yet to Liben she replies." Enough has he roamed with his braves; enough has he borne his red banner along the summit of the old mountain, and under fresh and tufted shade, and over moist green moss. Many are the mothers, the wives, and the little orphans, who curse the forest for his sake. Till now he has had the old mountain for mother; for love, the greenwood clothed in tufted foliage and freshened by the cool breeze. The grass was his bed, the leaves of the trees his coverlet; his drink came from the pure brook, for him the wood-birds sang. "Rejoice," sang the wood-birds, "for thee the wood is gay; the mountain and the cool brook!" But now Liben bids farewell to the forest; he is going home that his mother may affiance and wed him to the daughter of the Pope Nicholas.

Sea-views of the sea, rare in poetry of any sort, can scarcely be said to exist in folk-poesy. Sailors' songs have generally not much to do with the wonders of the deep; the larger part of them are known to be picked up on land, and the few exceptions to the rule are mostly kept from the ken of the outer and profane public. The Basque sailors have certain songs of their own, but only a solitary fragment of one of them has ever been set on record. Once when a Basque was asked to repeat a song he had been heard singing, he quietly said that he only taught it to those who sailed with him. The fragment just mentioned speaks of the silver trumpet (the master's whistle?) sounding over the waters at break of day, while the coast of Holland trembles in the distance. The first glimpse of a level reach of land in the morning haze could hardly be better described.

The sea impresses the dwellers on its shores chiefly by its depth and vastness. In folk-songs there is a frequent recurrence of phrases such as "the waters of the sea are vast, you cannot discern the bottom" (Basque); "High is the starry sky, profound the abyss of ocean" (Russian). The Greek calls the sea wicked, and watches the whitening waves which roll over drowned sailors. For the Southern Sclav it is simply a grey expanse. The Norseman calls it old, and blue—nature having for him one sole chord of colour—blue sea, white sands and snows, green pines. With Italian folk-singers it is a pretty point of dispute whether the blue sea-and-sky colour is to be preferred to the colour of the leaves and the grass. "Can you wear a lovelier hue than azure?" asks one; "the waves of the sea are clothed therein and the heavens when they are clear." The answer is that if the sky is clad in a blue garment, green is the vesture of the earth, "E foro del verde nasse ogni bel frutto." The arguments of the rival partisans remind one of an amusing scene in a play of Calderon's; one character is made to say, "Green is the earth's primal hue, the many-coloured flowers are born out of a green cradle." "In short," says another, "it is a mere earth-tint, while heaven is dressed in blue." "As to that," comes the retort, "it is all an azure fiction; far to be preferred is the veracious verdancy of the earth."

The Italian folk-poets' "castle in the air" is a castle in the sea. From Alp to Ætna the love-sick rhymers are fain to go and dwell with their heart's adoration "in mezzo al mar." But though agreed on the locality where they intend setting up in life, they differ considerably as to the manner of "castle" to be inhabited. The Sicilian, who makes a point of wishing for something worth having while he is about it, will only be satisfied with a palace built of peacock's plumes, a stair of gold, and a balcony inlaid with gems. A more modest minstrel, from the hither side of the straits of Messina, gives no thought at all to housekeeping; a little wave-lapped garden, full of pretty flowers, is all his desire. The Italian folk-poet sets afloat an astonishing number of things for no particular reason; one has planted a pear-tree, a second has heard a little wood-lark, a third has seen a green laurel, a fourth has found a small altar "in the sea-midst," a fifth discovers his own name "scritto all 'onne de lu mar."

The Greek lover has no wish to leave the mainland, but he is fond of picturing his beloved wandering by the shore at dawn to breathe the morning air, or reclining on a little stone bench at the foot of a hill, in the silence of solitude and the calm of the sea. For the rest, he knows too well "the wicked sea" for it to suggest to him none but pleasant images. If he is in despair, he likens himself to the waves, which follow one another to their inevitable grave. If he grows weary of waiting, he exclaims: "The sea darkens, the waves beat back on the beach; ah! how long have I loved thee!" One or two specimens have been already given of this particular kind of song; the recollection of a passing moment in nature is placed text-wise to a cry of human pain or love. A happy lover remembers in his transport the glacier glistening in the sunshine; he who languishes from the sickness of hope deferred, sees an affinity to his own mood in the lowering storm.

In the South, light is loved for its own sake. "Il lume è mezza compagnia," runs a Tuscan proverb: "Light is half company." In a memorable passage, St Augustine unfolds and elaborates the same idea of the companionship of light. A Tuscan countryman vows that if his love to fly from him becomes the light, he, to be near her, will become a butterfly. Perhaps so radiant an hyperbole would only have occurred to one who had grown up in the air of the Tuscan hills; the air to whose purity Michael Angelo ascribed all that his mind was worth. Anyway, a keen poetic sensibility is argued by the mere fact of thus joining, in a symbol of the indivisible, the least earth-clogged of sentient things with the most impersonal of natural phenomena. It is the more remarkable because, generally speaking, butterflies do not attract the notice of the unlettered people, even as they did not attract the notice of the objective and practical Greeks. It may be that were spirits to be seen flitting noiselessly about the haunts of men, they would, in time, be equally disregarded. To so few has it happened to know a butterfly, to watch closely its living beauty, to feel day by day the light feet or fluttering wings upon the hands which minister to its unsubstantial wants. Butterflies, to most of us, are but ethereal strangers; so by the masses they are not valued—at least, not in Europe. A tribe of West African negroes have this beautiful saying: "The Butterfly praises God within and without."

The folk-poet lives out of doors; he is acquainted with the home life of the sun and stars, and day-break is his daily luxury. The Eskimo tell a story of a stay-at-home man who dwelt in an island near the coast of East Greenland. It was his chief joy to see the sun rising in the morning, out of the sea, and with that he was content. But when his son had come to years of discretion, he persuaded his father to set out in a boat, so that he might see a little of the world. The man started from the island; no sooner, however, had he passed Cape Farewell than he saw the sun beginning to rise behind the land. It was more than he could bear; and he set off at once for his home. Next morning very early he went out of his tent; he did not come back. When he was sought after, he was found quite dead. The joy of seeing the sun rising again out of the sea had killed him. Most likely the story is based on a real incident. The Aztec goes out upon his roof to see the sunrise; it is his one religious observance. But of the cult of the sun I must not begin to speak. It belongs to an immense subject that cannot be touched here: the wide range of the unconscious appreciation of nature which was worship.

There is nothing more graceful in all folk-poesy than a little Czech star-poem:—

Star, pale star,

Didst thou know love,

Hadst thou a heart, my golden star,

Thou wouldst weep sparks.

Further north men do not willingly stay out abroad at night, but those whose calling obliges them to do so are looked upon as wise in strange lore. The first tidings of war coming reached the Esthonian shepherd boy, the keeper of the lambs, "who knew the sun, and knew the moon, and knew the stars in the sky." In Neo-Sanskrit speaking Lithuania there abound star-legends which differ from the southern tales of the same order, by reason of the pagan good faith that clings to them, The Italian is aware that he is romancing when he speaks of the moon travelling through the night to meet the morning star, or when he describes her anger at the loss of one of her stars; the Lithuanian has a suspicion that there may be a good deal of truth in his poets' account of the sun's domestic arrangements—how the morning star lights the fire for him to get up by, and the evening star makes his bed. He will tell you that once there was a time when sun and moon journeyed together, but the moon fell in love with the morning star, which brought about sad mischief. "The moon went with the sun in the early spring; the sun got up early; the moon went away from him. The moon walked alone, fell in love with the morning star. Perkun, greatly angered, stabbed her with a sword. 'Why wentest thou away from the sun? Why walk alone in the night? Why fall in love with the morning star? Your heart is full of sorrow.'" The Lithuanians have not wholly left that stage in man's development when what is imagined seems primâ facie quite as likely to be real as what is seen. The supernatural does not strike them as either mysterious or terrifying. It is otherwise with the Teuton. His night phantasms treat of what is, to man, of all things the most genuinely alarming—his own shadow. Ghosts, wild huntsmen, erl-kings take the place of an innocuous un-mortal race. No starry radiance can rob the night of its terrors. "The stars shine in the sky, bright shine the rays of the moon, fast ride the dead." Such is the wailing burden to the ballad which Burgher imitated in his Lenore. There is a wide gulf between this and the tender star-idylls of Lithuania, and a gulf still wider divides it from the neighbourly familiarity with which the southerner addresses the heavenly bodies. We go from one world to another when we turn back to Italy and hear the country lads singing, "La buona sera, O stella mattutina!" "Good evening to you, O matutinal star."

The West African negroes call the sky the king of sheds, and the sun the king of torches; the twinkling stars are the little chickens, and the meteor is the thief-star. "When day dawns, you rejoice," say the Yorubas; "do you not know that the day of death is so much the nearer?" The same tribe give this vivid description of a day-break scene: "The trader betakes himself to his trade, the spinner takes his distaff, the warrior takes his shield, the weaver bends over his sley, the farmer awakes, he and his hoe-handle, the hunter awakes, with his quiver and bow." Thoughtless of toil, the Tuscan joyfully cries, "Dawn is about to appear, bells chime, windows open, heaven and earth sing." The Greek holds that he who has not journeyed with the moon by night, or at dawn with the dew, has not tasted the world. Folk-poets have widely recognised the mysterious confusion between summer nights and days. The dispute at Juliet's window is recalled by the Venetian's chiding of the "Rondinella Traditora;" by the Berry peasants' vexation at the "vilaine alouette;" by the reproach of the Navarrese lover, "You say it is day, it is not yet midnight;" and most of all by the Servian dialogue: "Dawn whitens, the cock crows: It is not the dawn, but the moon. The cows low round the house: It is not the cows, it is the call to prayer. The Turks call to the mosque: It is not the Turks, it is the wolves." The observation of the swallow's morning song is another point at which the master poet and the obscure folk-singer meet. This time both are natives of sunny lands; there is a clear reason why it should be so—in the north the swallow passes almost for a dumb bird. Very rarely in England do we hear her notes, soft yet penetrating, like the high-pitched whisper of the Æolian harp. Some of us may, indeed, have first got acquainted with them in Dante's beautiful lines:—

Nell' ora che comincia i tristi lai

La Rondinella presso alia mattina ...

Little suspecting that he is committing the sin of plagiarism, the Greek begins one of his songs, "In the hour when the swallows, twittering, awake the dawn."

The ancient swallow myth does not seem to have anywhere crept into folk-lore; nor is there much trace of the old Scandinavian delusion that swallows spent the winter under the ice on lakes, or hanging up in caves like bunches of grapes. The swallow is taken simply as the typical bird of passage, the spring-bringer, the messenger, the traveller outre mer. She is the picked bird of countries, the African explorer, the Indian pioneer. A Servian story reports of her in the latter capacity. The small-leafed Sweet Basil complains, "Silent dew, why fallest thou not on me?" "For two mornings," answers the dew, "I fell on thee; this morning I amused myself by watching a great marvel. A vila (a mountain spirit) quarrelled with an eagle over yonder mountain. Said the vila, 'The mountain is mine.' 'No,' said the eagle, 'it is mine.' The vila broke the eagle's wing, and the young eaglets moaned bitterly, for great was their peril. Then a swallow comforted them: 'Make no moan, young eaglets, I will carry you to the land of Ind, where the amaranth grows up to the horses' knees, where the clover reaches their shoulders, where the sun never sets.'" How, it may be asked, did the poet come by that notion of an Asiatic Eden? The folk-singer seldom paints foreign scenery in these glowing tints. There may be something of a south-ward longing in the boast—

I'll show ye how the lilies grow

On the banks o' Italie.

But this is cold and colourless beside the empire of the unsetting sun.

Next to the swallow, the grey gull has the reputation of being the greatest traveller. Till lately the women of Croisic met on Assumption Day and sang a song to the gulls, imploring them to bring back their husbands and their lovers who were out at sea. Larks are often chosen as letter-carriers for short distances. The Greek knows that it is spring when pair by pair the turtle-doves swoop down to the brooks. He is an accurate observer; in April or May any retired English pool will be found flecked over with the down of the wood-pigeons that come to drink and bathe in it. The cooing of doves is by general consent associated with constancy and requited love. It is not always, however, that nations are agreed as to the sense of a bird's song. The "merrie cuckoo" is supposed by the Sclavs to be rehearsing an endless dirge for a murdered brother. A Czech poet lays down yet another cause for its conjectured melancholy: "Perched upon an oak tree, a cuckoo weeps because it is not always spring. How could the rye ripen in the fields if it were always spring? How could the apples ripen in the orchard if it were always summer? How could the corn harden in the rick if it were always autumn?" In spite of the sagacious content shown by these inquiries, it is probable that the sadness which the Sclav attributes to the cuckoo-cry is but an echo of the sadness, deep and wide, of his own race.

Of the nightingale the Tuscan sings, in the spirit of one greater than he,—

Vedete là quel rusignol che canta

Col suo bel canto lamentar si vuole,—

which is not, by the by, his only Miltonic inspiration; there is a rustling of Vallombrosian leaves through the couplet, composed perhaps in Vallombrosia:

E quante primavera foglie adorna

Che sì vaga e gentile a noi ritorna.

The Bulgarian sees a mountain trembling to the song of three nightingales. Like his Servian neighbours, he must always have a story, and here is his nightingale story. Marika went into the garden; she passed the pomegranate-tree and the apple-tree, and sat her down under the red rose-tree to embroider a white handkerchief. In the rose-tree was a nightingale, and the nightingale said: "Let us sing, Marika; if you sing better than I, you shall cut off my wings at the shoulders and my feet at the knee; if I sing better than you, I will cut off your hair at the roots." They sang for two days, for three days; Marika sang the best. Then the nightingale pleaded, "Marika, fair young girl, do not cut off my feet, let me keep my wings, for I have three little nightingales to rear, and of one of them I will make you a gift." "Nightingale, sweet singer," said Marika, "I will give thee grace of thy wings, and even of thy feet; go, tend thy little ones, make me a gift of one to lull me to sleep, and of one to awake me."

We may take leave of bird-lays with the pretty old Bourbonnaise chanson:—

Derrier' chez nous, il y a-t-un vert bocage,

Le rossignol y chant' tous les jours;

Là il y dit en son charmant langage:

Les amoreux sont malheureux toujours!

Flowers, the green leaves and the grass, are suggestive of two kinds of pathos. The individual flower, the grass or leaf of any one day or spring-tide, becomes the type of the transitoriness of beauty and youth and life. "Sing whilst ye are young and fair, soon you will be slighted, as are sere lilies," is the song even of happy Tuscany. To the Sclav it seems a question whether it be worth while that there should be any flowers or morning gladness, since they must be gone so soon. "O my garden," sings the Ruthenian, "O my little garden, my garden and my green vine, why bloomest thou in the morning? Hardly bloomed, thou art withered, and the earth is strewn with thy leaves." The other kind of pathos springs from a deeper well. Man passes by, each one hurries to his tragedy; Nature smiles tranquilly on. This moving force of contrast was known to Lywarch Hen, and to those Keltic bards who dived so deep into Nature's secrets that scarcely a greater depth has been fathomed by any after-comers. It was perceived involuntarily by the English ballad-singers, who strung a burden of "Fine flowers" upon a tale of infanticide, and bade blackbird and mavis sing their sweetest between a murder and an execution. And it is this that gives its key-note to an Armenian popular song of singular power. A bishop tells how he has made himself a vineyard; he has brought stones from the valleys and raised a wall around it; he has planted young vines and plentifully has he watered their roots. Every morning the nightingale sings sweetly to the rose. Every morning Gabriel says to his soul: "Rise and come forth from this vineyard, from this newly-built vineyard." He has not eaten the fruit of the vine; he has built a wine-vat, but the wine he has not tasted; he has brought cool streams from the hills, but he has not drunk the water thereof; he has planted red and white roses, but he has not smelt their fragrance. The turtle-dove sings to the birds, and the spring is come. Gabriel calls to his soul, the light of his eyes grows dim; "It is time I leave my vineyard, my beautiful vineyard." There is hardly another poem treating of death which is so un-illuminated by one ray from a future dawn.

In the great mass of folk-songs flowers are dealt with simply as the accessories to all beautiful things. The folk-poet learns from them his alphabet of beauty. Go into any English cornfield after harvest; whilst the elder children glean wheat ears, the children of two and three years glean small yellow hearts-eases, vervaine, and blue scabious. They are as surely learning to distinguish the Beautiful as the student in the courts of the Vatican. Through life, when these children think of a beautiful thing, the thought of a flower will not be far off. Religion and love, after all the two chief embellishments of the life of the poor, have been hung about with flowers from the past of Persephone and Freya till to-day. Even in England the common people are glad if they can find a lily of the valley to carry to church at Whitsuntide, and the first sign that a country girl has got a sweetheart is often to be read in the transformation of the garden-plot before her door. In Italy you will not walk far among the vineyards and maize-fields without coming upon a shrine which bears traces of floral decoration. Some Italian villages and country towns have their special flower festival, or Infiorata; Genzano, for instance, where, on the eighth day after Corpus Domini, innumerable flowers are stripped of their petals, which are sorted out according to colour and then arranged in patterns on the way to the church, the magnificence of the effect going far to make one condone the heartlessness of immolating so many victims to achieve an hour's triumph. A charge of stupid indifference to beauty has been brought against the Italian peasant—it would seem partly on the score that he has been known to root up his anemones in order to put a stop to the inroads of foreign marauders. There are certain persons, law-abiding in the land which gave them birth, who when abroad, adopt the ethics of our tribal ancestors. A piece of ground, a tree, or a plant not enclosed by a wall, is turned by this strange public to its own uses. A walnut tree by the wayside has a stick thrown among its branches to fetch down the walnuts. The peasant does what he can to protect himself. He observes that flowers attract trespassers, and so he roots up the flowers. There are Italian folk-songs which show a delight in flowers not to be surpassed anywhere. Flower-loving beyond all the rest are the Tuscan poets, whose love-lyrics have been truly described as "tutti seminati di fiori"—all sown with lilies, clove pinks, and jessamine. The fact fits in pleasantly with the legend of the first Florentines, who are said to have called their city after "the great basket of flowers" in which it was built. It fits in, too, with the sentiment attached even now to the very name of Florence. The old Floraja in the overgrown straw hat at the railway station can reckon on something more abiding than her long-lost charms to find her patrons; and it is curious to note how few of the passengers reject the proffered emblems of the flower town, or fail to earn the parting wish "Felice ritorno!"

One point may be granted; in Italy and elsewhere the common people do not highly or permanently value scentless flowers. A flower without fragrance is to them almost a dead flower. I put the question to a troop of English children coming from a wood laden with spoils, "What makes you like primroses?" "The scent of them," was the answer. A little further along the lane came another troop, and the question was repeated. This time the answer was, "Because they smell so nice." No flower has been more widely reverenced than the unassuming sweet basil, the Basilica odorato of Sicilian songs, the Tulasi plant of India, where it is well-nigh worshipped in the house of every pious Hindu. The scale is graduated thus: the flower which has no smell is plucked in play, but left remorselessly to wither as children leave their daisy chains; the flower which has a purely sweet and fresh perfume is arranged in nosegays, set in water, praised and enjoyed for the day; the flower which has a scent of spice and incense and aromatic gums bears off honours scarcely less than divine.

The folk-poet sings because heaven has given him a sweet voice and a fair mistress; because the earth brings forth her increase and the sun shines, and the spring comes back, and rest at noontide and at evening is lovely, and work in the oil-mill and in the vineyard is lovely too: he sings to embellish his labour and to enhance his repose. He lives on the shield of Achilles, singing, accompanied by a viol, to the grape-pickers; he is crowned with flowers in the golden age of Lucretius as he raises his sweet song at the festa. We have seen a little of what he says about Nature, but, in truth, he is still her interpreter when he says nothing. All folk-poesy is sung and folk-songs are as much one of Nature's voices as the song of the birds, the song of the brooks, the song of the wind in the pine-tops. So it is likewise with the rude musical instruments which the exigencies of his life have taught the peasant how to make; they utter tones more closely in harmony with nature than those of the finest Stradivarius. The Greeks were right when they made Pan with his reed-pipe rather than Apollo with his lyre the typical Nature-god. Anyone to whom it has chanced to hear a folk-song sung in its own home will understand what is meant. You may travel a good deal and not have that chance. The songs, the customs, the traditions of the people form an arcanum of which they are not always ready to lift the veil. To those, of course, whose lives are cast among a people that still sings, the opportunity comes oftener. But if the song be sung consciously for your pleasure its soul will hardly remain in it. I shall always vividly remember two occasions of hearing a folk-song sung. Once, long ago, on the Bidassoa. The day was closing in; the bell was tolling in the little chapel on the heathery mountain-side, where mass is said for the peace of the brave men who fell there. Fontarabia stood bathed in orange light. It was low water, and the boat got almost stranded; then the boatmen, an older and a younger man, both built like athletes, began to sing in low, wild snatches for the tide. Once, not very long since, at the marble quarry of Sant' Ambrogio. Here also it was towards evening and in the autumn. The vintage was half over; all day the sweet "Prenda! Prenda!" of the grape-gatherers had invited the stranger to share in its purple magnificence. The blue of the more distant Veronese hills deepened against a coralline sky; not a dark thing was in sight except here or there the silhouette of a cypress. Only a few workmen were employed in the quarry; one, a tall, slight lad, sang in the intervals from labour an air full of passion and tenderness. The marble amphitheatre gave sonority to his high voice. Each time Nature would have seemed incomplete had it lacked the human song.

ARMENIAN FOLK-SONGS.

Obscure in their origin, and for the most part having at first had no such auxiliary as written record to aid their preservation, the single fact of the existence of folk-songs may in general suffice to proclaim them the true articulate voice of some sentiment or feeling, common to the large bulk of the people whence they emanate. It is plain that the fittest only can survive—only such as are truly germane to those who say or sing them. A herdsman or tiller of the soil strings together a few verses embodying some simple thought which came into his head whilst he looked at the green fields or the blue skies, or it may be as he acted in a humble way as village poet-laureate. One or two friends get them by heart, and possibly sing them at the fair in the next hamlet: if they hit, others catch them up, and so the song travels for miles and miles, and may live out generations. If not, the effusion of our poetical cowherd dies away quite silently—not much to his distress, for had its fate been more propitious its author would probably have been very little the wiser. One celebrated poet, and I think but one, has in our own times begun his career in like manner with the unknown folk-singer. The songs of Sandor Petöfi were popular over the breadth of the Hungarian Puszta before ever they appeared in print; and those who know him, know how faithfully he breathes forth the soul of the Magyar race. In a certain sense it is true that every real poet is the spokesman of his people. No two works, for instance, are so characteristic of their respective countries as the Divina Commedia and Faust. Still, the hands of genius idealise what they touch; the great poet personifies rather than reflects his people, and if he serves them as representative, it is in an august, imperial fashion within the Senate House of Fame, outside whose doors the multitude hustles and seethes. When we want to see this multitude as in a mirror, to judge its common instincts and impulses that go very far to cast the nation in the type which makes it what it is, it is a safer and surer plan to search out its own spontaneous and untutored songs than to consult the master work attached to immortal names.

How far the individuality of a race is decided or modified by the natural phenomena in which it is placed is a nice point for discussion, and one not to be disposed of by off-hand generalities. In what consists the sympathetic link, sometimes weak and scarcely perceptible, at others visibly strong, between man and nature? Why does the emigrated mountaineer, settled in comfort, ease, and prosperity in some great metropolis, wake up one day with the knowledge that he must begone to the wooden chalet with the threat of the avalanche above and the menace of the flood below—or he must die? Is it force of early association, habit, or fancy? Why is the wearied town-tied brain-worker sensible of a nostalgia hardly less poignant when he calls to mind how the fires of day kindled across some scene of snow or sea with which his eyes were once familiar? Is it nothing more than the return of a long ago experienced admiration? I think that neither physicist nor psychologist—and both have a right to be heard in the matter—would answer that the cause of these sensations was to be thus shortly defined. Again ask the artist what the Athenian owed to the purity and proportion of the lines of Grecian landscape, what the Italian stole from the glow and glory of meridional light and colour—what the Teuton learnt from the ascending spires of Alpine ice? Was it that they saw and copied? Or rather, that Nature's spirit, vibrating through the pulses of their being, moulded into form the half-divine visions of master-sculptor, painter, architect?

It does not, however, require to go deeper than the surface of things in order to understand that a peoples' songs must be largely influenced by the accidents of natural phenomena, and especially where climate and physical conformation are such as must perforce stir and stimulate the imaginative faculties of the masses. We have an instance to the point in the ballads of the "mountainous island" bounded by seas and plains, which the natives call Hayasdan and we Armenia. The wondering emotion aroused by a first descent from the Alps into Italy is well known; to not a few of the mightiest of northern poets this journey has acted like a charm, a revelation, an awakening to fuller consciousness. In Armenia, the incantation of a like natural antithesis is worked by the advent of its every returning spring: a sluggard of a season that sleeps on soundly till near midsummer, but comes forth at last fully clothed in the gorgeous raiment of a king. In days gone by the Armenian spring was dedicated to the goddess Anahid, and as it broke over the land the whole people joined in joyful celebration of the feast of Varthavar or "Rose-blossoms," which since Christian times has been transformed into the three days' festival of the Transfiguration. Beautiful is the face of the country when the tardy sun begins to make up for lost time, as though his very life depended on it; shooting down his beams with fiery force through the rarefied ether, melting away the snows, and ripening all at once the grain and grapes, the wild fig, apricot and olive, mulberry and pomegranate. What wonder that the Armenian loves the revivifying lamp of day, that he turns the dying man towards it, and will not willingly commit his dead to the earth if some bright rays do not fall into the open grave! At the sun's reveille there is a general resurrection of all the buried winter population—women and children, cows and sheep, pink-eyed lemmings, black-eyed caraguz, and little kangaroo-shaped jerboas. Out, too, from their winter lairs come wolf and bear, hyena and tiger, leopard and wild boar. The stork returns to his nest on the broad chimney-pot, and this is what the peasant tells him of all that has happened in his absence:

Welcome, Stork!

Thou Stork, welcome;

Thou hast brought us the sign of spring,

Thou hast made our heart gay.

Descend, O Stork!

Descend, O Stork, upon our roof,

Make thy nest upon our ash-tree.

I will tell thee my thousand sorrows,

The sorrows of my heart, the thousand sorrows,

Stork, when thou didst go away,

When thou didst go away from our tree,

Withering winds did blow,

They dried up our smiling flowers.

The brilliant sky was obscured,

That brilliant sky was cloudy:

From above they were breaking the snow in pieces:

Winter approached, the destroyer of flowers.

Beginning from the rock of Varac,

Beginning from that rock of Varac,

The snow descended and covered all;

In our green meadow it was cold.

Stork, our little garden,

Our little garden was surrounded with snow;

Our green rose trees

Withered with the snow and the cold.

But now the rose trees in the garden are green again, and out abroad wild flowers enamel the earth. Down pour the torrents of melted snow off Mount Ararat, down crash the avalanches of ice and stones let loose by the sun's might; wherever an inch of soil or rock is uncovered it becomes a carpet of blossom. High up, even to 13,000 feet above the sea-level, the deep violet aster, the saxifrage, and crocus, and ranunculus, and all our old Alpine acquaintances, form a dainty morsel for the teeth, or a carpet for the foot, of swift capricorn or not less agile wild sheep. A little lower, amidst patches of yet frozen snow, hyacinths scent the air, yellow squills and blue anemones peep out, clumps of golden iris cluster between the rocks. There, too, is the "Fountain's Blood," or "Blood of the Seven Brothers," as the Turk would say, with its crimson, leafless stalk and lily-like bloom, the reddest of all red flowers. Upon the trees comes the sweet white kasbé, a kind of manna much relished by the inhabitants. Amongst the grass grow the Stars of Bethlehem, to remind us, as tradition has it, that hard by on Ararat—beyond question the great centre of Chaldean Star-worship—the wise men were appointed to watch for the appearance of a sign in the heavens, and that thence they started in quest of the place "where the young child lay." Tulips also abound; if we may credit the legend, they had their origin in the Armenian town of Erzeroom, springing from the life-blood of Ferdad when he threw himself from the rocks in despair at a false alarm of the death of his beloved Shireen.

Erzeroom is by common consent in these parts the very site of the Garden of Eden. For many centuries, affirms the Moslem, the flowers of Paradise might yet be seen blossoming round the source of the Euphrates not far from the town. But, alas! when the great Persian King Khosref Purveez, the rival of the above-mentioned Ferdad, was encamped in that neighbourhood, he was rash enough to spurn a message from the young Prophet Mohammed, offering him protection if he would embrace the faith of Islâm. What booted the protection of an insignificant sectary to him? thought the Shah-in-Shah, and tossed the letter into the Euphrates. But Nature, horrified at the sacrilegious deed, dried up her flowers and fruits, and even parched the sources of the river itself; the last relic of Eden became a waste. There is a plaintive Armenian elegy composed in the person of Adam sitting at the gate of Paradise, and beholding Cherubim and Seraphim entering the Garden of which he once was king, "yea, like unto a powerful king!" The poet puts into Adam's mouth a new line of defence; he did not eat of the fruit, he says, until after he had witnessed its fatal effects upon Eve, when, seeing her despoiled of all her glory, he was touched with pity, and tasted the immortal fruit in the hope that the Creator contemplating them both in the same wretched plight might with paternal love take compassion on both. But vain was the hope; "the Lord cursed the serpent and Eve, and I was enslaved between them." "O Seraphim!" cries the exiled father of mankind:

When ye enter Eden, shut not the gate of Paradise; place me

standing at the gate; I will look in a moment, and then

bring me back.

Ah! I remember ye, O flowers and sweet-swelling fountains.

Ah! I remember ye O birds, sweet-singing—and ye, O

beasts:

Ye who enjoy Paradise, come and weep over your king; ye who

are in Paradise planted by God, elected from the earth of

every kind and sort.

High above the hardiest saxifrage tower the three thousand feet of everlasting snows that crown Mount Ararat. The Armenians call it Massis or "Mother of the World," and old geographers held that it was the centre of the earth, an hypothesis supported by various ingenious calculations. The Persians have their own set of legends about it; they say that Ararat was the cradle of the human race, and that at one time it afforded pasture up to the apex of its dome; but upon man's expulsion from Eden, Ahriman the serpent doomed the whole country to a ten months' winter. As to the semi-scriptural traditions gathered round the mountain, there is no end to them. "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat," so says the Bible, and it is an article of faith with the Armenian peasant that it is still somewhere up at the top, only not visible. He is extremely loth to believe that anybody has actually attained the summit. Parrot's famous ascent was long regarded as the merest fable. At the foot of Ararat was a village named Argoory, or "he planted the vine," where Noah's vineyard is pointed out to this day, though the village itself was destroyed in 1840, when the mountain woke up from its long slumbers and rolled down its side a stream of boiling lava; but we are told that, owing to the sins of the world, the vines no longer bear fruit. Close at hand is Manard, "the mother lies here," alluding to the burial-place of Noah's wife, and yonder is Eravan or "Visible," the first dry land which Noah perceived as the waters receded. Armenian choniclers relate that when after leaving the ark the descendants of Noah dispersed to different quarters, one amongst them, by name Haig, the great-grandson of Japhet, settled with his family in Mesopotamia, where he probably took part in the building of the Tower of Babel. Later, however, upon Belus acquiring dominion over the land, Haig found his rule so irksome to himself and his clan that they migrated back in a body of 300 persons to Armenia, much to the displeasure of Belus, who summoned them to return, and when they refused, despatched a large army to coerce them into obedience. Haig collected his men on the shores of Van, and thus sagaciously addressed them:

When we meet with the army of Belus, let us attempt to draw near where he lies surrounded by his warriors; either we shall be killed, and our camp equipments and baggage will fall into his hands, or, making a show of the strength of our arm, we shall defeat his army, and victory will be ours.

These tactics proved completely successful, and Belus fell mortally wounded by an arrow from Haig's bow. Having in this way disposed of his enemies, the patriarch was able before he died to consolidate Hayasdan into a goodly kingdom, which he left to the authority of his son Armenag.

After the reign of Haig the thread of Armenian annals continues without break or hitch; it must be admitted that no people, not even the Jews, boast a history which "begins with the beginning" in a more thorough way, nor does the work of any chronicler proceed in a more methodical and circumstantial manner than that of Moses of Khoren, the Herodotus of Armenia. As is well known, Moses, writing in the fifth century, founded his chronicle upon a work undertaken about five hundred years before by one Marabas Cattina, a Syrian, at the request of the great Armenian monarch Vagshaishag. Marabas stated that his record was based upon a manuscript he had discovered in the archives of Nineveh which bore the indorsement, "This book, containing the annals of ancient history, was translated from the Chaldean into Greek, by order of Alexander the Great." Whatever may be the precise amount of credence to which the Chronicle of Moses is entitled, all will agree that it narrates the story of a high-spirited and intelligent people whom the alternating domination of Greek and Persian could not cower into relinquishing the substance of their liberties, and whose efforts, in the main successful, on behalf of their cherished independence, were never more vigorous than at times when their triumph seemed farthest off. For nearly a thousand years after the date of Moses of Khoren, his people maintained their autonomy, and whether we look before or after the flight of the last Armenian king before the soldiers of the Crescent, we must acknowledge that few nations have fought more valiantly for their political rights, whilst yet fewer have suffered more severely for their fidelity to their faith. It is the pride of the Armenians that theirs was the first country which adopted the Christian religion; it may well be their pride also, that they kept their Christianity in the teeth of persecutions which can only find a parallel in those undergone by the Hebrew race.

Armenia is naturally rich in early Christian legends, of which the most curious is perhaps that of the correspondence alleged to have occurred between Our Lord and Abgar, king of Hayasdan. The latter, it is said, having sent messengers to transact some business with the Roman generals quartered in Palestine, received on their return such accounts of the miracles performed by Jesus of Nazareth as convinced him either that Christ was God come down upon the earth, or that he was the son of God. Suffering from a grave malady, and hearing, moreover, that the Jews had set their hearts on doing despite to the Prophet who had risen in their midst, Abgar wrote a letter beseeching Christ to come to his capital and cure him of his sickness. "My city is indeed small," this letter naïvely concludes, "but it is sufficient to contain us both." The king also sent a painter to Jerusalem, so that if Our Lord could not come to Edessa he might at least possess his portrait. The painter was one day endeavouring to fulfil his mission when he was observed by Christ, who passing a handkerchief over his face, gave it to the Armenian impressed with the likeness of his features. The response to Abgar's letter was written by St Thomas, who said, on behalf of his Divine Master, that his work lay elsewhere than in Armenia, but that after his Ascension he would send an Apostle to enlighten the people of that country. This correspondence, though now not accepted as authentic out of Armenia, was mentioned by some of the earliest Church historians, and it is asserted that one of the letters has been found written on papyrus in an Egyptian tomb.

Christianity seems to have made some way in Armenia in the second century, but to what extent is unknown. What is certain is, that in the third century, St Gregory the Illuminator, after having been tortured in twelve different ways by King Tiridates for refusing to worship the goddess Anahid, and kept at the bottom of a well for fourteen years, was taken out of it in consequence of a vision of the king's sister, and converted that monarch and all his subjects along with him. St Gregory is held in boundless reverence by the Armenians; he is almost looked upon as a divine viceroy, as will be seen from the following canzonette which Armenian children are taught to sing:

The light appears, the light appears!

The light is good:

The sparrow is on the tree,

The hen is on the perch,

The sleep of lazy men is a year,

Workman, rise and begin thy work!

The gates of heaven are opened,

The throne of gold is erected,

Christ is sitting on it;

The Illuminator is standing,

He has taken the golden pen,

He has written great and small.

Sinners are weeping,

The just are rejoicing.

The poet of the people nowhere occupies himself with casting about for a fine subject; he writes of what he feels and of what he sees. The Armenian peasant sees the snow in winter; in summer he sees the flowers and the birds—only birds and flowers are to him the pleasanter sight, so he sings more about them. He rarely composes any verse without a flower or a bird being mentioned in it; all his similes are ornithological or botanical, and by them he expresses the tenderest emotions of his heart. There is a pathos, a simplicity really exquisite in the conception of some of these little bird-and-flower pieces, as, for example, in the subjoined "Lament of a Mother" over her dead babe:

I gaze and weep, mother of my boy,

I say alas and woe is me wretched!

What will become of wretched me,

I have seen my golden son dead!

They seized that fragrant rose

Of my breast, and my soul fainted away;

They let my beautiful golden dove

Fly away, and my heart was wounded.

That falcon Death seized

My dear and sweet-voiced turtle dove and wounded me.

They took my sweet-toned little lark

And flew away through the skies!

Before my eyes they sent the hail

On my flowering green pomegranate,

My rosy apple on the tree,

Which gave fragrance among the leaves.

They shook my flourishing beautiful almond tree,

And left me without fruit;

Beating it they threw it on the ground

And trod it under foot into the earth of the grave.

What will become of wretched me!

Many sorrows surrounded me.

O, my God, receive the soul of my little one

And place him at rest in the bright heaven!

The birds of Armenia are countless in their number and variety, from vulture to wren; there are so many of them that a man (it is said poetically) may ride for miles and miles and never see the ground, which they entirely cover, except over the small space from which they fly up with a deafening whizz to make a passage for his horse. At times the plains have the appearance of being dyed rose-colour through the swarms of the gorgeous red goose which congregate upon them, whilst here and there a whitish spot is formed by a troop of his grey-coated relatives. It seems that the Armenian has found out why it was the wild goose and the tame one separated from each other. Once upon a time, when all were wild and free, one goose said to another on the eve of a journey, "Mind you are ready, my friend, for, Inshallah (please God), I set out to-morrow morning." "And so will I," he profanely replied, "whether it pleases God or not." Sure enough next morning both geese were up betimes, and the religious one spread out his wings and sailed off lightly towards the distant land. But, lo! when the impious goose tried to do likewise, he flapped and flapped and could not stir from the ground. So a countryman caught him, and he and his children for ever fell into slavery.

The partridge is a great favourite of the Armenian, who does not tire of inventing lyrics in its honour. Here is a specimen:

The sun beats from the mountain's top,

Pretty, pretty:

The partridge comes from her nest;

She was saluted by the flowers,

She flew and came from the mountain's top.

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

When I hear the voice of the partridge

I break my fast on the house-top:

The partridge comes chirping

And swinging from the mountain's side.

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

Thy nest is enamelled with flowers,

With basilico, narcissus, and water-lily:

Thy place is full of dew,

Thou delightest in the fragrant odour.

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

Thy feathers are soft,

Thy neck is long, thy beak little,

The colour of thy wing is variegated:

Thou art sweeter than the dove.

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

When the little partridge descends from the tree,

And with his sweet voice chirps,

He cheers all the world,

He draws the heart from the sea of blood.

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge.

All the birds call thee blessed,

They come with thee in flocks,

They come around thee chirping:

In truth there is not one like thee.

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! beautiful little partridge!

Another song gives the piteous plaint of an unhappy partridge who was snared and eaten. "Like St Gregory, they let me down into a deep well; then they took me up and sat round a table, and they cut me into little pieces, like St James the Intercised." The crane, who, with the stork, brings the promise of summer on his wing, receives a warm welcome, and when the Armenian sees a crane in some foreign country he will say to him:—

Crane, whence dost thou come? I am the servant of thy voice. Crane, hast thou not news from our country? Hasten not to thy flock; thou wilt arrive soon enough! Crane, hast thou not news from our country?

I have left my possessions and vineyard and come hither. How often do I sigh; it seems that my soul is taken from me. Crane, stay a little, thy voice is in my soul. Crane, hast thou not news from our country? My God, I ask of thee grace and favour, the heart of the pilgrim is wounded, his lungs are consumed; the bread he eats is bitter, the water he drinks is tasteless. Crane, hast thou not news from our country?

Thou comest from Bagdad, and goest to the frontiers. I will write a little letter and give it to thee. God will be the witness over thee; thou wilt carry it and give it to my dear ones.

I have put in my letter that I am here, that I have never even for a single day been happy. O, my dear ones, I am always anxious for you! Crane, hast thou not news from our country?

The autumn is near, and thou art ready to go: thou hast joined a large flock: thou hast not answered me, and thou art flown! Crane, go from our country and fly far away!

The nameless author of these lines has had Dante's thought:

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui . . .

It is strange that the Armenians should be at once one of the most scattered peoples on the face of the earth, and one of the most passionately devoted to their fatherland.

It should not be forgotten, when reading these Armenian bird-lays, that an old belief yet survives in that country that the souls of the blessed dead fly down from heaven, in the shape of beautiful birds, and perching in the branches of the trees, look fondly at their dear ones on earth as they pass beneath. When the peasant sees the birds fluttering above overhead in the wood he will on no account molest them, but says to his boy, "That is your dear mother, your little brother, your sister—be a good child, or it will fly away and never look at you again with its sweet little eyes."

The clear cool streams and vast treacherous salt lakes of Armenia are not without their laureates. Thus sings the bard of a mountain rivulet:

"Down from yon distant mountain

The water flows through the village, Ha!

A dark boy comes forth,

And washing his hands and face,

Washing, yes washing,

And turning to the water, asked, Ha!

Water, from what mountain dost thou come?

O my cool and sweet water! Ha!

I came from that mountain,

Where the old and new snow lie one on the other.

Water, to what river dost thou go?

O my cool and sweet water! Ha!

I go to that river

Where the bunches of violets abound. Ha!

Water, to what vineyard dost thou go?

O my cool and sweet water! Ha!

I go to that vineyard

Where the vine-dresser is within! Ha!

Water, what plant dost thou water?

O my cool and sweet water! Ha!

I water that plant

Whose roots give food to the lamb,

The roots give food to the lamb,

Where there are the apple tree and the anemone.

Water, to what garden dost thou go?

O my cool and sweet water! Ha!

I go into that garden

Where there is the sweet song of the nightingale! Ha!

Water, into what fountain dost thou go?

O my cool and sweet little water!

I go to that fountain

Where thy love comes and drinks.

I go to meet her and kiss her chin,

And satiate myself with her love.

The dwellers on the shores of Van—the largest lake in Armenia, which is situated between 5000 and 6000 feet above the sea, and covers more than 400 square miles—are celebrated for possessing the poetic gift in a pre-eminent degree. Their district is fertile and picturesque, so picturesque that when Semiramis passed that way she employed 12,000 workmen and 600 architects to build her a city on the banks of the lake, which was named Aghthamar, and which she thereafter made her summer residence. The business that brought Semiramis into Armenia was a strange romance. Ara, eighth patriarch of Hayasdan, was famed through all the East for his surpassing beauty, and the Assyrian queen hearing that he was the fairest to look upon of all mortal men, sent him a proposal of marriage; but he, staunch to the faith in the one true God, which he believed had been transmitted to him from Noah, would have nothing to say to the offer of the idolatrous ruler. Semiramis, greatly incensed, advanced with her army into the heart of Armenia, and defeated the forces of the Patriarch; but bitter were the fruits of the victory, for Ara, instead of being taken alive, as she had commanded, was struck down at the head of his men, and his beautiful form, stiffened by death, was laid at the queen's feet. Semiramis was plunged in the wildest despair; she endeavoured to bring him to life by magic; that failing, she had his body embalmed and placed in a golden coffin, which was set in her chamber; no one was allowed to call him dead, and she spoke of him as her beloved consort. A spot is pointed out to the traveller bearing the name of Ara Seni, "Ara is sacrificed."

The favourite theme of the men of Van is, of course, the treacherous element on which the lot of most of them is cast. One of their songs gives the legend of the "Old Man and the Ship." Our Lord, as an old man with a white beard, cried sweetly to the sailors to take him into the ship. The sailors answer that the ship is freighted by a merchant, and the passage-money is great. "Go away, white-bearded old man," they say. But our Lord pays the money and comes into the ship. Presently a gale blows up and the sailors are exceeding wroth, for they imagine the strange passenger has brought them ill-luck. They ask, "Whence didst them come, O sinful man? Thou art lost, and thou hast lost us!" "I a sinner!" replies the Lord, "give me the ship, and go you to sweet sleep." He made the sign of the cross with his right hand, with his left he steered the helm. It was not yet mid-day when the ship safely reached the shore.

Brothers, arise from your sweet sleep, from your sweet sleep
and your sad dreams. Fall at the feet of Jesus; here is our
Lord, here is our ship.

"Sweet sleep and sad dreams"—he must have been a true poet who thus crystallised the sense of poor humanity's unrest, even in its profoundest repose. The whole little story strikes one as full of delicate suggestiveness.

One more sample of the style of the Armenian "Lake-school."

On One Who Was Shipwrecked on the Lake of Van.

We sailed in the ship from Aghthamar,

We directed our ship towards Avan;

When we arrived before Vosdan

We saw the dark sun of the dark day.

Dull clouds covered the sky,

Obscuring at once stars and moon;

The winds blew fiercely,

And took from my eyes land and shore.

Thundered the heaven, thundered the earth,

The waters of the blue sea arose;

On every side the heavens shot forth fire;

Black terror invaded my heart.

There is the sky, but the earth is not seen,

There is the earth, but the sun is not seen;

The waves come like mountains

And open before me a deep abyss.

O sea, if thou lovest thy God,

Have pity on me, forlorn and wretched;

Take not from me my sweet sun,

And betray me not to flinty-hearted Death.

Pity, O sea, O terrible sea!

Give me not up to the cold winds;

My tears implore thee

And the thousand sorrows of my heart....

The savage sea has no pity!

It hears not the plaintive voice of my broken heart;

The blood freezes in my veins,

Black night descends upon my eyes....

Go tell to my mother

To sit and weep for her darkened son;

That John was the prey of the sea,

The sun of the young man is set!

Summer, with its flowers, and warmth, and wealth, never stays long enough in Armenia for it to become a common ordinary thing. It is a beautiful wonder-time, a brief, splendid nature-fair, which vanishes like a dream before the first astonishment and delight are worn into indifference. The season when "the nightingale sings to the rose at dewy dawn" departs swiftly, and envious winter strangles autumn in its birth.

What a winter, too! a winter which despotically governs the complete economy of the people's system of life. Let us take a peep into an Armenian interior on a December evening. Three months the snow has been in possession of mountain and valley; for more than four months more it will remain. Abroad it is light enough, though night has fallen; for the moon shines down in wonderful brightness upon the ice-bound earth. On the hill-slope various little unevennesses are discernible, jutting out from the snow like mushrooms. In one part the ground is cut away perpendicularly for a few feet; this is the front of the homestead, the body of which lies burrowed in the slope of the hill. When the house was made the floor was dug out some five feet underground, while the ceiling beams rose three or four feet above it; but all the dug-out soil was thrown about the roof and back and side walls, and thus the whole is now embedded in the hillock. The roof was neatly turfed over when the house was finished, so that in summer the lambs and children play upon it, and not unfrequently, in the great heats, the family sleep there—"at the moon's inn." What look like mushrooms are in reality the broad-topped chimneys, on which the summer storks build their nests. The homestead has but one entrance; a large front door which leads through a long dark passage to a second door that swings-to after you, and is hung with a rough red-dyed sheepskin. This door opens upon the entrance-hall, whence you mount half-a-dozen steps to a raised platform, under which the house dogs are located. On two sides the platform is bounded by solid stone walls, from which are suspended saddles, guns, pistols, and one or two pictures representing the deeds of some Persian hero, and bought of Persian hawkers. On the other two sides an open woodwork fence divides it from a vast stable. Nearest the grating are fastened the horses of the clan-chief; next are the donkeys, then the cows; sheep and chickens find places where they can. The breath of these animals materially contributes to the warmth of the house, which is at times almost like an oven, even in the coldest weather. A clear hot fire burns on the hearth; the fuel used is tezek, a preparation of cow-dung pressed into a substance resembling peat turf. By day the habitation is obscurely lighted through a small aperture in the roof glazed with oiled silk, and supplemented by a sort of funnel, the wide opening downwards. Now, in the evening, the oil burning in a simple iron lamp over the hearth, affords a dim illumination.

The platform above described is the salemlik, or hall of reception. It contains no chairs, but divans richly draped with Koordish stuffs; the floor is carpeted with tekeke, a kind of grey felt. To the right of the hearth sits the head of the family, a venerable old man, whose word is incontrovertible law to every member of his house. He is also Al Sakal, or "white beard" of the village, a dignity conferred on him by the unanimous voice of his neighbours, and constituting him intermediary in all transactions with government. When important matters are at stake, he meets the elders of the surrounding hamlets, who, resolved into committee, form the Commune. This ancient usage bears witness to the essentially patriarchal and democratic basis of Armenian society.

Our family party consists of three dozen persons, the representatives of four generations. The young married women come in and out from directing the preparations of the supper. Nothing is to be seen of their faces except their lustrous eyes (Armenian eyes are famous for their brilliancy), a tightly-fitting veil enclosing the rest of their features. Without this covering they do not by any chance appear even in the house; it is said they wear it also at night. One of them is a bride; her dress is rich and striking—a close-fitting bodice, fastening at the neck with silver clasps, full trousers of rose-coloured silk gathered in at the ankles by a fillet of silver, the feet bare, a silver girdle of curious workmanship loosely encircling the waist, and a long padded garment open down the front which hangs from the shoulders. Poor little bride! She has not uttered a single word save when alone with her husband since she pronounced the marriage vow. She may not hope to do so till after the birth of her first-born child; then she will talk to her nursling, after a while to her mother-in-law, sometime later she may converse with her own mother, and by-and-by, in a subdued whisper, with the young girls of the house. During the first year of her married life she may not go out of the house except twice to church. Her disciplinary education will not be complete for six years, after which she will enjoy comparative liberty, but never in her life must she open her lips to a person of the stronger sex not related to her. Turn from the silent little bride to that bevy of young girls, merry and playful as the kittens they are fondling—silky-haired snowballs, of a breed peculiar to the neighbourhood of Van, their tails dyed pink with henna like the tail of the Shah's steed. The girls are laughing and chatting together without restraint—most probably about their love affairs, for they are free to dispose of their hands as they choose. And they may walk about unveiled, and show off their pretty faces and long raven plaits to the fullest advantage.

Suddenly a knocking is heard outside; the dogs yell from under the platform; the Whitebeard says whoever be the wanderer he shall have bed and board, and he orders fresh tezek to be thrown on the fire; for to-night it is bitter cold out abroad—were a man to stand still five minutes, he would freeze in his shoes. One of the sons descends the steps, pushes aside the sheep-skin, and leads the traveller in. This one says he is the minstrel. What joy in the family! The blind minstrel, who will sing the most exciting ballads and tell the most marvellous tales. He is welcomed by all; only the young bride steals out of the room—she may not remain in a stranger's presence. The lively girls want to hear a story at once; but the Whitebeard says the guest must first have rest and refreshment. But while they are waiting for the meal to be laid out, the blind minstrel relates something of his recent travels, which in itself is almost as good as a fairy tale. He has just arrived from Persia, whither he will soon return; for he has only come back to the snows of Armenia to breathe the air of home for a little. Did he go to Teheran? No; to say the truth, he deemed it wiser to keep at a discreet distance from that capital. Such a thing had been heard of ere now as the Shah putting under requisition any skilful musicians who came in his way to teach their art to the fair ones of the harem; so that occasionally it was unpleasantly difficult to get out of Teheran when once you were in it. Still he was by no means without interesting news. In a certain part of Persia he had met another blind master-singer, with whom he strove for the prize of minstrelsy. Both were entertained by a great Persian prince. When the day came they were led out upon an open grass-plot and seated one facing the other. The prince took up his position, and five thousand people made a circle round the competitors. Then the grand brain-fight began; the rivals contended in song and verse, riddle and repartee. Now one starts an acrostic on the prince's name, in which each side takes alternate letters; then the other versifies some sacred passage, which his opponent must catch up when he breaks off. The ball is kept flying to and fro with unflagging zeal; the crowd is rapturous in its plaudits. But at length our minstrel's adversary pauses, hesitates, fails to seize the drift of his rival's latest sally, and answers at random. A shout proclaims him beaten. The triumphant bard is led to where he stands, and taking his lyre from him breaks it into atoms. The vanquished retires discomfited to the obscurity of his native village, where haply his humble talents will not be despised. The victor is robed in the prince's mantle, and taken to the highest seat in the banqueting-hall.

This is what the minstrel has to tell as he warms his hands over the fire while the young married women serve the supper. A rush-mat is placed upon the low round board, over that the table-cloth; then a large tray is set in the middle, with the viands arranged on it in metal dishes: onion soup, salted salmon-trout from the blue Gokschai, hard-boiled eggs shelled and sliced, oil made from Kunjut seeds, which does instead of butter; pilau, a dish resembling porridge; mutton stewed with quinces, leeks, and various raw and preserved roots, cream cheese, sour milk, dried apricots, and stoned raisins, form the bill of fair. A can of golden wine is set out: there is plenty more in the goatskins should it be wanted. The provisions are completed by an item more important in Armenia than with us—bread. The flour-cake or losh, a yard long and thin as paper, which is placed before each guest, answers for plate, knives, forks, napkin, all of which are absent. The Whitebeard says grace and the Lord's Prayer, everyone crossing himself. The company wipe their mouths with a losh, and proceed to help themselves with it to anything that tempts their fancy on the middle tray. Some make a promiscuous sandwich of fish, mutton, and leeks wrapped up in a piece of losh; others twist the losh into the shape of a spoon and ladle out the sour milk, swallowing both together. The members of the family watch the minstrel's least gesture, so as to anticipate his wishes; one after the other they claim the privilege of waiting on him. When the meal is done, a young housewife gently washes the guest's head and feet, and the whole party adjourn to the chimney-corner. The evening flies mirthfully away, listening to the minstrel's tales and ballads, these latter being mostly in Tartar, the Provençal of the eastern troubadour. Finally, the honoured visitor is conducted to his room, the "minstrel's chamber," which, in every well-ordered Armenian household, is always kept ready.

Our little picture may be taken as the faithful reproduction of no very extraordinary scene. Of ballad-singers such as the one here introduced there are numbers in Armenia, where that "sixth sense," music, is the recognised vocation of the blind. Those who are proficient travel within a very wide area, and are everywhere received with the highest consideration.

In the East, the ballad-singer and the story-teller are just where they were centuries ago. At Constantinople, the story-teller sits down on his mat in the public place or at the café; listeners gather round; he begins his story in a conversational tone, varying his voice according to the characters; and soon both himself and his hearers are as far away in the wondrous mazes of the "Arabian Nights" as if Europe were still trembling before the sword of the Caliph.

With regard to the unique marriage customs of Armenia, I ought to say that they are asserted to result in the happiest unions. The general idea upon which they rest seems to be derived from a series of conclusions logical enough if you grant the premisses—indeed, curiously more like some pen and paper scheme evolved out of the inner consciousness of a German professor than a working system of actual life. The prevailing custom in the East, as in some European countries, is for the young girl to know nothing whatever of her intended husband; only in the one case this is followed by total seclusion after marriage, and in the other by complete emancipation. In Armenia, on the contrary, the young girl makes her own choice, and love-matches are not uncommon; but the choice once made and ratified by the priest, the order of things is so arranged as to cause her husband to become the woman's absorbing thought, his society her sole solace, his pleasure the whole business of her life. For the rest she is treated with much solicitude; even the peasant will not let his wife do out-door work.

Moses of Khoren gives the history of a wedding that took place about one hundred years after Christ. In those days the tribes of the Alans, in league with the mountaineers of the Caucasus and a part of the people of Georgia, descended upon Armenia in considerable numbers. Ardashes, the Armenian king, assembled his troops and advanced against them. In a battle fought upon the confines of the two nations, the Alans gave way, and having crossed the Cyrus, encamped on the northern bank, the river dividing the contending forces. The son of the King of the Alans had been taken prisoner and was conducted to Ardashes. His father offered to conclude a peace on such conditions as Ardashes might exact and under promise, guaranteed by a solemn oath, that the Alans would attempt no further incursions on Armenian territory. As Ardashes refused to surrender the young prince, the sister of the youth ran to the edge of the river and climbing upon a lofty hillock, caused these words to be addressed to the enemy's camp by the mouth of interpreters: "Hear me, valorous Ardashes, conqueror of the brave Alans; grant unto me the surrender of this young man—unto me, the maiden with beautiful eyes. It is not worthy of a hero in order to satisfy a desire for vengeance, to take the life of the sons of heroes or to hold them in bondage and keep up an endless feud between two nations." Ardashes, having heard these words, approached the river. He saw the beautiful Sathinig, listened to her wise counsels, and fell in love with her. Then, having called Sumpad, an aged warrior who had watched over his childhood, he laid bare the wish of his heart to marry the princess, make a treaty of amity with her nation and send back the prince in peace. Sumpad, having approved of these projects, sent to ask the King of the Alans for the hand of Sathinig. "What!" replied her father, "will the valorous King Ardashes have ever treasure enough to offer me in return for the noble damsel of the Alans?"

A popular song, carefully preserved by Moses, celebrates the marriage of Ardashes and Sathinig:—

The valiant King Ardashes, astride of a sable charger,

Drew forth a thong of leather, garnished with golden rings:

And quick as fast-flying eagle he crossed the flowing river

And the crimson leather thong, garnished with rings of gold,

Cast he about the body of the Virgin of the Alans,

Clasping in painful embrace the maiden's tender form:

Even so he drew her swiftly to his encampment.

Once again Ardashes appears in the people's poetry. He is no longer the triumphant victor in love and war; the hour of his death draws near. "Oh!" says the dying king, "who will give me back the smoke of my hearth, and the joyous New Year's morning, and the spring of the deer, and the lightness of the roe?" Then his mind wanders away to the ruling passion: "We sounded the trumpets; after the manner of kings we beat the drums."

The Armenian princes were in the habit, when they married, of throwing pieces of money from the threshold of their palace, whilst the royal brides scattered pearls about the nuptial chamber. To this custom allusion is made in two lines which used to be sung as a sort of marriage chaunt:—

A rain of gold fell at the wedding of Ardashes,

A rain of pearls fell on the nuptials of Sathinig.

Armenian nuptial songs, like all other folk-epithalamiums, so far as I am aware, seem to point to an early state of society when the girl was simply carried off by her marauding lover by fraud or force. Exulting in what relates to the bridegroom, the favourite song on this subject is profoundly melancholy as concerns the bride. The mother was cajoled with a pack of linen, the father with a cup of wine, the brother with a pair of boots, the little sister with a finger of antimony—so complains the dismal ditty of a new bride. There is great pathos in the words in which she begs her mother not to sweep the sand off the little plank, so that the slight trace of her girl's footsteps may not be effaced.

Marriage is called in Armenian, "The Imposition of the Crown," from the practice of crowning bride and bridegroom with fresh, white flowers. I remember how, in one of the last marriages celebrated in the little Armenian church in the Rue Monsieur (which was closed a few years ago, when the Mekhitarist property in Paris was sold), this ceremony was omitted by particular request of the bridegroom, a rising French Diplomatist, who did not wish to wear a wreath of roses. The Armenian marriage formulæ are extremely explicit. The priest, taking the right hand of the bride, and placing it in that of the bridegroom, says: "According to the Divine order God gave to our ancestors, I give thee now this wife in subjection. Wilt thou be her master?" To which the answer is, "Through the help of God, I will." The priest then asks the woman: "Wilt thou be obedient to him?" She answers: "I am obedient according to the order of God." The interrogations are repeated three times, and three times responded to.

An Armenian author, M. Ermine, published at Moscow in 1850 a treatise on the historical and popular songs of ancient Armenia.

Of popular songs current in more recent times there was not, till lately, a single specimen within reach of the public, though it was confidently surmised that such must exist. The Mekhitarist monks have taken the lead in this as in every other branch of Armenian research, and my examples are quoted from a small collection issued by their press at Venice. I am not sure that I have chosen those that are intrinsically the best, but think that those which figure in these pages are amongst the most characteristic of their authors and origin. The larger portion of these songs are printed from manuscripts in the library of San Lazzaro; the date of their composition is thought to vary from the end of the thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The language in which they are written is the vulgar tongue of Armenia, but in several instances it attains a very close approximation to the classical Armenian.

It may not be amiss if I conclude this sketch with a brief account of the remarkable order of the Mekhitarists, which is so intimately related with all that bears on the subject of Armenian literature. Those who are well acquainted with it will not object to hear the history of this order recapitulated; while I believe that many who have visited the Convent of San Lazzaro have yet but vague notions regarding the work and aims of its inmates. It is to be conjectured that, as a matter of fact, the majority of Englishmen go to San Lazzaro rather in the spirit of a Byron-pilgrimage than from any definite interest in the convent; and without doubt were its only attraction its association with the English poet it would still be worth a visit. Byron's connection with San Lazzaro was not one of the least interesting episodes of his life; and it is pleasant to remember the tranquil hours he spent in the society of the learned monks, and the fascination exercised over him by their sterling and unpretentious merit. "The neatness, the comfort, the gentleness, the unaffected devotion of the brethren of the order," he wrote, "are well fitted to strike the man of the world with the conviction that there is 'Another and a better even in this life.'" The desire to present himself with an excuse for frequent intercourse with the brothers was probably at the bottom of Byron's sudden discovery that his mind "wanted something craggy to break upon, and that Armenian was just the thing to torture it into attention." He says it was the most difficult thing to be found in Venice by way of an amusement, and describes the Armenian character as a very "Waterloo of an alphabet." The origin of this character is exceedingly curious, it being the only alphabet known to have been the work of a single man, with the exception of the Georgian, and now obsolete Caucasian Albanian. St Mesrop, an Armenian, invented all the three about A.D. 406. Byron informs Moore, with some elation, of the fate that befell a French professorship of Armenian, which had then been recently instituted: "Twenty pupils presented themselves on Monday morning, full of noble ardour, ingenuous youth, and impregnable industry. They persevered with a courage worthy of the nation, and of universal conquest till Thursday, then fifteen out of the twenty succumbed to the six-and-twentieth letter of the alphabet." The poet himself mastered all thirty-three letters, and a good deal more besides, under the superintendence of the librarian, Padre Paschal Aucher, a man who combined great learning with much knowledge of the world. As the result of these studies we have a translation into Scriptural English of two apocryphal epistles of St Paul, and an Anglo-Armenian grammar, of which, with characteristic liberality, Byron defrayed the cost of publication.

The order was founded by Varthabed Mekhitar, who was born at Sebaste, in Asia Minor, in 1676. Mekhitar was one of those men to whom it comes quite naturally to go forth with David's sling and stone against the Philistine and his host. He could have been scarcely more than twenty years of age when fearlessly and steadfastly he set himself to the gigantic task of raising his country out of the stagnant slough of ignorance in which he saw it sunk. He was then a candidate for holy orders, studying in an Armenian convent.

The monks he found no less ignorant than the rest of the population; those to whom he broached his ideas greeted them with derision, and this did not fail to turn to cruel persecution when he began to preach against certain prejudices which appeared to him to keep the Armenians from conforming with the Latin Church—a union he earnestly desired. Mekhitar now went to Constantinople, where he set on foot a small monastic society; presently he moved to Modon, in the Morea, then under the rule of Venice, but before he had been there long, the place was seized by the Turks. A few of the monks, with their head, managed to escape to Venice; the others were taken prisoners, and sold into a temporary slavery. At Venice, in 1717, the Signory made over to the fugitives in perpetuity a small barren island in the Lagune, once tenanted by the Benedictines, who had there established a hospital for lepers, but which, since the disappearance of that disease, had been entirely uninhabited. Mekhitar immediately organised a printing press, and began making translations of standard works, which were disseminated wherever Armenians were to be found, that is to say, all over the East. When he died in 1747, the work of the society was already placed on a solid foundation; but it received considerable development and extension from the hands of the third abbot-general, Count Stephen Aconzkover, Archbishop of Sinnia, by birth a member of an Armenian colony in Hungary, who sought admittance into the order, and lived in the retirement of San Lazzaro for sixty-seven years. He was a poet, a scholar of no mean attainments, and the author of a universal geography in twelve volumes. The Society is now self-supporting, large numbers of its publications being sold in Persia, and India, and at Constantinople. These publications consist of numerous translations and of reproductions of the great part of Armenian literature. Many works have been printed from MSS. which are collected by emissaries sent out from San Lazzaro to travel over the plains and valleys of Armenia for the purpose of rescuing the literary relics which are widely scattered, and are in constant danger of loss or destruction, and at the same time to distribute Armenian versions of the Bible. Another of the undertakings of the convent is a school exclusively for the education of Armenian boys. About one hundred boys receive free instruction in the two colleges at Venice. What this order have effected, both towards the enlightenment of their country and in keeping alive the sentiment of Armenian nationality, is simply incalculable. In their self-imposed exile they have nobly carried out the precept of an Armenian folk-poet:

Forget not our Armenian nation,

And always assist and protect it.

Always keep in thy mind

To be useful to thy fatherland.

On my first visit I passed a long summer morning in examining all the points of interest about the monastery—the house and printing presses, the library with its beautiful Pali papyrus of the Buddhist ordination service, and its illuminated manuscripts, the minaretted chapel, and the silent little Campo Santo, under the direction of the most courteous and accomplished of cicerones, Padre Giacomo, Dr Issaverdenz: a name signifying "Jesus-given." I saw the bright, intelligent band of scholars: "of these," said my conductor, "five or six will remain with us." I was shown the page of the visitor's book inscribed with Byron's signature in English and in Armenian. Later entries form a long roll of royal and notable names. The little museum contains Daniel Manin's tricolor scarf of office, given to the monks by the son of that devoted patriot. Queen Margherita does not fail to pay San Lazzaro a yearly visit, and has lately accepted the dedication of a book of Armenian church music.

During this tour of inspection, various topics were discussed: the tendencies of modern thought, the future of the church, with other matters of a more personal nature—and upon each my guide's observations displayed a singularly intellectual and tolerant attitude of mind, together with a way of looking at things and speaking of people in which "sweetness and light" were felicitously apparent. It was difficult to tear oneself away from the open window in Byron's little study. The day was one of those matchless Venetian days, when the heat is tempered by a breeze just fresh enough to agitate the awning of your gondola; and the Molo and Riva, and Fortune's golden ball on the Dogana, the white San Giorgio Maggiore, the ships eastward bound, the billowy line of the mountains of Vicenza against the horizon, lie steeped in a bath of sunshine. But the outlook from the convent window is not upon these. Beneath are the green berceaux of a small vineyard, a little garden gay in its tangle of purple convolvulus, a pomegranate lifting its laden boughs towards us—to remind the Armenians of the "flowering pomegranates" of their beloved country. Beyond the vineyard stretches the aquamarine surface of the lagune—then the interminable reach of Lido—after that the ethereal blue of the Adriatic melting away into the sky. Such is the scene which till they die the good monks will have under their eyes. Perhaps they are rather to be envied than compassionated; for it is manifest that for them, duty—to use the eloquent expression of an English divine—has become transfigured into happiness. "I shall stay here whilst I live," Dr Issaverdenz said, "and I am happy—quite happy!"

VENETIAN FOLK-SONGS.

To the idealised vision that goes along with hereditary culture a large town may seem an impressive spectacle. For Wordsworth, worshipper of nature though he was, earth had not anything to show more fair than London from Westminster Bridge, and Victor Hugo found endless inspiration on the top of a Parisian omnibus. As shrines of art, as foci of historic memories, even simply as vast aggregates of human beings working out the tragi-comedy of life, great cities have furnished the key-note to much fine poetry. But it is different with the letterless masses. The student of literature, who turns to folk-songs in search of a new enjoyment, will meet with little to attract him in urban rhymes; if there are many that present points of antiquarian interest, there are few that have any kind of poetic worth. The people's poetry grows not out of an ideal world of association and aspiration, but from the springs of their life. They cannot see with their minds as well as with their eyes. What they do see in most great towns is the monotonous ugliness which surrounds their homes and their labour. Then again, it is a well-known fact that with the people loss of individuality means loss of the power of song; and where there is density of population there is generally a uniformity as featureless as that of pebbles on the sea beach. Still to the rule that folk-poesy is not a thing of town growth one exception has to be made. Venice, unique under every aspect, has songs which, if not of the highest, are unquestionably of a high order. The generalising influences at play in great political centres have hardly affected the inhabitants of the city which for a thousand years of independence was a body politic complete in itself. Nor has Venetian common life lacked those elements of beauty without whose presence the popular muse is dumb. The very industries of the Venetians were arts, and when they were young and spiritually teachable, their chief bread-winning work of every day was Venice—her ducal chapel, her campanile, her palaces of marble and porphyry. In the process of making her the delight of after ages, they attended an excellent school of poetry.

The gondolier contemporary with Byron was correctly described as songless. At a date closely coinciding with the overthrow of Venetian freedom, the boatmen left off waking the echoes of the Grand Canal, except by those cries of warning which, no one can quite say why, so thrill and move the hearer. It was no rare thing to find among the Italians of the Lombardo-Venetian provinces the old pathetic instinct of keeping silence before the stranger. I recollect a story told me by one of them. When he was a boy, Antonio—that was his name—had to make a journey with two young Austrian officers. They took notice of the lad, who was sprightly and good-looking, and by and by they asked him to sing. "Canta, canta, il piccolo," said they; "sing us the songs of Italy." He refused. They insisted, and, coming to a tavern, they gave him wine, which sent the blood to his head. So at last he said, "Very well, I will sing you the songs of Italy." What he sang was one of the most furiously anti-Austrian songs of '48. "Ah! taci, taci il piccolo!" cried the officers, but the "piccolo" would not be quiet until he had sung the whole revolutionary repertory. The Austrians knew how to appreciate the boy's spirit, for they pressed on him a ten franc piece at parting.

To return to Venice. In the year 1819 an English traveller asked for a song of a man who was reported to have once chanted Tasso alla barcaruolo; the old gondolier shook his head. "In times like these," he said, "he had no heart to sing." Foreign visitors had to fall back on the beautiful German music, at the sound of which Venetians ran out of the Piazza, lest they might be seduced by its hated sweetness. Meanwhile the people went on singing in their own quarters, and away from the chance of ministering to their masters' amusement. It is even probable that the moral casemate to which they fled favoured the preservation of their old ways, that of poetising included. Instead of aiming at something novel and modern, the Venetian wished to be like what his fathers were when the flags on St Mark's staffs were not yellow and black. So, like his fathers, he made songs and sang songs, of which a good collection has been formed, partly in past years, and partly since the black-and-yellow standard has given place, not, indeed, to the conquered emblems of the Greek isles, but to the colours of Italy, reconquered for herself.

Venetian folk-poesy begins at the cradle. The baby Venetian, like most other babies, is assured that he is the most perfect of created beings. Here and there, underlying the baby nonsense, is a dash of pathos. "Would you weep if I were dead?" a mother asks, and the child is made to answer, "How could I help weeping for my own mamma, who loves me so in her heart?" A child is told that if he asks his mother, who is standing by the door, "What are you doing there?" she will reply, "I am waiting for thy father; I wait and wait, and do not see him coming; I think I shall die thus waiting." The little Venetian has the failings of baby-kind all the world over; he cries and he laughs when he ought to be fast asleep. His mother tells him that he was born to live in Paradise; she is sure that the angels would rejoice in her darling's beauty. "Sleep well, for thy mother sits near thee," she sings, "and if by chance I go away, God will watch thee when I am gone."

A christening is regarded in Venice as an event of much social as well as religious importance. By canon law the bonds of relationship established by godfatherhood count for the same as those of blood, for which reason the Venetian nobles used to choose a person of inferior rank to stand sponsor for their children, thus escaping the creation of ties prohibitive of marriage between persons of their own class. In this case the material responsibilities of the sponsor were slight—it was his part to take presents, and not to make them. By way of acknowledging the new connection, the child's father sent the godfather a marchpane, that cake of mystic origin which is still honoured and eaten from Nuremberg to Malaga. With the poor, another order of things is in force. The compare de l'anelo—the person who acted as groomsman at the marriage—is chosen as sponsor to the first-born child. His duties begin even before the christening. When he hears of the child's birth, he gets a piece of meat, a fowl, and two new-laid eggs, packs them in a basket, and despatches them to the young mother. Eight days after the birth comes the baptism. On returning from the church, the sponsor, now called compare de San Zuane, visits the mother, before whom he displays his presents—twelve or fifteen lire for herself; for the baby a pair of earrings, if it be a girl; and if a boy, a pair of boy's earrings, or a single ornament to be worn in the right ear. Henceforth the godfather is the child's natural guardian next to its parents; and should they die, he is expected to provide for it. Should the child die, he must buy the zogia (the "joy"), a wreath of flowers now set on the coffins of dead infants, but formerly placed on their heads when they were carried to the grave-isle in full sight of the people. This last custom led to even more care being given to the toilet of dead children than what might seem required by decency and affection. To dress a dead child badly was considered shameful. Tradition tells of what happened to a woman who was so miserly that she made her little girl a winding-sheet of rags and tatters. When the night of the dead came round and all the ghosts went in procession, the injured babe, instead of going with the rest, tapped at its mother's door and cried, "Mamma, do you see me? I cannot go in procession because I am all ragged." Every year on the night of the dead the baby girl returned to make the same reproach.

Venetian children say before they go to bed:

Bona sera ai vivi,

E riposo ai poveri morti;

Bon viagio ai naveganti

E bona note ai tuti quanti.

There is a sort of touching simplicity in this; and somehow the wish of peace to the "poor dead" recalls a line of Baudelaire's—

Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs.

But as a whole, the rhymes of the Venetian nursery are not interesting, save from their extreme resemblance to the nursery rhymes of England, France, or any other European country. They need not, therefore, detain us.

Twilight is of an Eastern brevity on the Adriatic shore, both in nature and in life. The child of yesterday is the man of to-day, and as soon as the young Venetian discovers that he has a heart, he takes pains to lose it to a Tosa proportionately youthful. The Venetian and Provençal word Tosa signifies maiden, though whether the famous Cima Tosa is thus a sister to the Jungfrau is not sure, some authorities believing it to bear the more prosaic designation of baldheaded ("Tonsurata"). Our young Venetian may perhaps be unacquainted with the girl he has marked out for preference. In any case he walks up and down or rows up and down assiduously under her window. One night he will sing to a slow, languorous air—possibly an operatic air, but so altered as to be not easy of recognition—"I wish all good to all in this house, to father and to mother and as many as there be; and to Marieta who is my beloved, she whom you have in your house." The name of the singer is most likely Nane, for Nane and Marieta are the commonest names in Venice, which is explained by the impression that persons so called cannot be bewitched, a serious advantage in a place where the Black Art is by no means extinct. The maiden long remembers the night when first her rest was disturbed by some such greeting as the above. She has rendered account of her feelings:

Ah! how mine eyes are weighed in slumber deep!

Now all my life it seems has gone to sleep;

But if a lover passes by the door,

Then seems it this my life will sleep no more.

It does not do to appropriate a serenade with too much precipitation. Don Quixote gave it as his experience that no woman would believe that a poem was written expressly for her unless it made an acrostic on her name spelt out in full. Venetian damsels proceed with less caution: hence now and then a sad disappointment. A girl who starts up all pit-a-pat at the twanging of a guitar may be doomed to hear the cruel sentence pronounced in Lord Houghton's pretty lyric:

"I am passing—Premé—but I stay not for you!

Premé—not for you!"

Even more unkind are the literal words of the Venetian: "If I pass this way and sing as I pass, think not, fair one, that it is for you—it is for another love, whose beauty surpasses yours!"

A brother or a friend occasionally undertakes the serenading. He is not paid like the professional Trovador whom the Valencian lover engages to act as his interpreter. He has no reward in view but empty thanks, and it is scarcely surprising if on damp nights he is inclined to fall into a rather querulous vein. "My song is meant for the Morosa of my companion," says one of these accommodating minstrels. "If only I knew where she was! But he told me that she was somewhere in here. The rain is wetting me to the skin!" Another exclaims more cheerfully, "Beautiful angel, if it pleases God, you will become my sister-in-law!"

After the singing of the preliminary songs, Nane seeks a hint of the effect produced on the beloved Marieta. As she comes out of church, he makes her a most respectful bow, and if it be returned ever so slightly, he musters up courage, and asks in so many words whether she will have him. Marieta reflects for about three days; then she communicates her answer by sign or song. If she does not want him, she shuts herself up in the house and will not look out for a moment. Nane begs her to show her face at the window: "Come, oh! come! If thou comest not 'tis a sign that thou lovest me not; draw my heart out of all these pangs." Marieta, if she is quite decided, sings back from behind the half-closed shutters, "You pass this way, and you pass in vain: in vain you wear out shoes and soles; expect no fair words from me." It may be that she confesses to not knowing her own mind: "I should like to be married, but I know not to whom: when Nane passes, I long to say 'Yes;' when Toni passes, I am fain to look kindly at him; when Bepi passes, I wish to cry, God bless you!" Or again, it may be that her heart is not hers to give:

Wouldst thou my love? For love I have no heart;

I had it once, and gave it once away;

To my first love I gave it on a day ...

Wouldst thou my love? For love I have no heart.

In the event of the girl intimating that she is disposed to listen to her Moroso if all goes well, he turns to her parents and formally asks permission to pay his addresses to their daughter. That permission is, of course, not always granted. If the parents have thoughts of a wealthier match, the poor serenader finds himself unceremoniously sent about his business. A sad state of things ensues. Marieta steals many a sorrowful glance at the despised Nane, who, on his side, vents his indignation on the authors of her being in terms much wanting in respect. "When I behold thee so impassioned," he cries, "I curse those who have caused this grief; I curse thy papa and thy mamma, who will not let us make love." No idea is here implied of dispensing with the parental fiat; the same cannot be said of the following observations: "When I pass this house, my heart aches. The girl wills me well, her people will me ill; her people will not hear of it, nor, indeed, will mine. So we have to make love secretly. But that cannot really be done. He who wishes for a girl, goes and asks for her—out of politeness. He who wants to have her, carries her off." It would seem that the maiden has been known to be the first to incite rebellion:

Do, my beloved, as other lovers do,

Go to my father, and ask leave to woo;

And if my father to reply is loth,

Come back to me, for thou hast got my troth.

When the parents have no primâ facie objection to the youth, they set about inquiring whether he bears a good character, and whether the girl has a real liking for him. These two points cleared up satisfactorily, they still defer their final answer for some weeks or months, to make a trial of the suitor and to let the young people get better acquainted. The lover, borne up by hope, but not yet sure of his prize, calls to his aid the most effective songs in his repertory. The last thing at night Marieta hears:—

Sleep thou, most fair, in all security,

For I have made me guardian of thy gate,

Safe shalt thou be, for I will watch and wait;

Sleep thou, most fair, in all security.

The first thing in the morning she is greeted thus:

Art thou awake, O fairest, dearest, best?

Raise thy blond head and bid thy slumbers fly;

This is the hour thy lover passes by,

Throw him a kiss, and then return to rest.

If she has any lurking doubts of Nane's constancy she receives the assurance, "One of these days I will surely make thee my bride—be not so pensive, fairest angel!" If, on the other hand, Nane lacks complete confidence in her affection, he appeals to her in words resembling I know not what Eastern love-song: "Oh, how many steps I have taken to have thee, and how many more I would take to gain thee! I have taken so many, many steps that I think thou wilt not forsake me."

The time of probation over, the girl's parents give a feast, to which the youth and his parents are invited. He brings with him, as a first offering, a small ring ornamented with a turquoise or a cornelian. Being now the acknowledged lover, he may come and openly pay his court every Sunday. On Saturday Marieta says to herself, "Ancuo xe sabo, doman xe festa—to-morrow is fête day, and to-morrow I expect Nane!" Then she pictures how he will come "dressed for the festa with a little flower in his hand;" and her heart beats with impatience. If, after all, by some chance—who knows? by some faithlessness perhaps—he fails to appear, what grief, what tears! Marieta's first thought when she rises on Sunday morning is this: "No one works to-day for it is festa; I pray you come betimes, dearest love!" Then comes the second thought: "If he does not come betimes, it is a sign that he is near to death; if later I do not see him, it is a sign that he is dead." The day passes, evening is here—no Nane! "Vespers sound and my love comes not; either he is dead, or" (the third and bitterest thought of all) "a love-thief has stolen him from me!"

Some little while after the lover has been formally accepted, he presents the maiden with a plain gold ring called el segno, and a second dinner or supper takes place at her parent's house, answering to the German betrothal feast; henceforth he is the sposo and she the novizza, and, as in Germany, people look on the pair as very little less than wedded. The new bride gives the bridegroom a silk handkerchief, to which allusion is made in a verse running, "What is that handkerchief you are wearing? Did you steal it or borrow it? I neither stole it nor borrowed it; my Morosa tied it round my neck." At Easter the sposo gives a cake and a couple of bottles of Cyprus or Malaga; at Christmas a box of almond sweetmeats and a little jug of mostarda (a Venetian spécialité composed of quinces dressed in honey and mustard); at the feast of St Martin, sweet chestnuts; at the feast of St Mark, el bocolo—that is, a rosebud, emblematical of the opening year. The lover may also employ his generosity on New Year's day, on the girl's name-day, and on other days not specified, taking in the whole 365. Some maidens show a decided taste for homage in kind. "My lover bids me sing, and to please him I will do it," observes one girl, thus far displaying only the most disinterested amiability. But presently she reveals her motives: "He has a ring with a white stone; when I have sung he will give it to me." A less sordid damsel asks only for a bunch of flowers; it shall be paid for with a kiss, she says. Certain things there are which may be neither given nor taken by lovers who would not recklessly tempt fate. Combs are placed under the ban, for they may be made to serve the purposes of witchcraft; saintly images and church-books, for they have to do with trouble and repentance; scissors, for scissors stand for evil speaking; and needles, for it is the nature of needles to prick.

Whether through the unwise exchange of these prohibited articles, or from other causes, it does sometimes happen that the betrothed lovers who have been hailed by everybody as novizza and sposo yet manage to fall out beyond any hopes of falling in again. If it is the youth's fault that the match is broken off, all his presents remain in the girl's undisputed possession; if the girl is to blame, she must send back the segno and all else that she has received. It is said that in some districts of Venetia the young man keeps an accurate account of whatever he spends on behalf of his betrothed, and in the case of her growing tired of him, she has to pay double the sum total, besides defraying the loss incurred by the hours he has sacrificed to her, and the boots he has worn out in the course of his visits.

It is more usual, as well as more satisfactory, for the betrothal to be followed in due time by marriage. After the segno has been "passed," the sposo sings a new song. "When," asks he, "will be the day whereon to thy mamma I shall say 'Madona;' to thy papa 'Missier;' and to thee, darling, 'Wife'?" "Madona" is still the ordinary term for mother-in-law at Venice; in Tuscan songs the word is also used in that sense, though it has fallen out of common parlance. Wherever it is to be found, it points to the days when the house-mother exercised an unchallenged authority over all members of the family. Even now the mother-in-law of Italian folk-songs is a formidable personage; to say the truth, there is no scant measure of self-congratulation when she happens not to exist. "Oh! Dio del siel, mandeme un ziovenin senza madona!" is the heartfelt prayer of the Venetian girl.

If the youth thinks of the wedding day as the occasion of forming new ties—above all that dearest tie which will give him his anzola bela for his own—the maiden dreams of it as the zornada santa; the day when she will kneel at the altar and receive the solemn benediction of the church upon entering into a new station of life. "Ah! when shall come to pass that holy day, when the priest will say to me, 'Are you content?' when he shall bless me with the holy water—ah! when shall it come to pass?"

It has been noticed that the institution of marriage is not regarded in a very favourable light by the majority of folk-poets, but Venetian rhymers as a rule take an encouraging view of it. "He who has a wife," sings a poet of Chioggia, "lives right merrily co la sua cara sposa in compagnia." Warning voices are not, however, wanting to tell the maiden that wedded life is not all roses: "You would never want to be married, my dear, if you knew what it was like," says one such; while another mutters, "Reflect, girls, reflect, before ye wed these gallants; on the Ponte di Rialto bird cages are sold."

The marriage generally comes off on a Sunday. Who weds on Monday goes mad; Tuesday will bring a bad end; Wednesday is a day good for nothing; Thursday all manner of witches are abroad; Friday leads to early death; and, as to Saturday, you must not choose that, parchè de sabo piove, "because on Saturday it rains!"

The bride has two toilets—one for the church, one for the wedding dinner. At the church she wears a black veil, at the feast she appears crowned with flowers. After she is dressed and before the bridegroom arrives, the young girl goes to her father's room and kneeling down before him, she prays with tears in her eyes to be forgiven whatever grief she may have caused him. He grants her his pardon and gives her his blessing. In the early dawn the wedding party go to church either on foot or in gondolas, for it is customary for the marriage knot to be tied at the conclusion of the first mass. When the right moment comes the priest puts the vera, or wedding ring, on the tip of the bride's finger, and the bridegroom pushes it down into its proper place. If the vera hitches, it is a frightfully bad omen. When once it is safely adjusted, the best man steps forward and restores to the bride's middle finger the little ring which formed the lover's earliest gift; for this reason he is called compare de l'anelo, a style and title he will one day exchange for that of compare de San Zuane.

At the end of the service the bride returns to her father's house, where she remains quietly till it is time to get ready for dinner. As the clock strikes four, the entire wedding party, with the parents of bride and bridegroom and a host of friends and relations, start in gondolas for the inn at which the repast is to take place. The whole population of the calle or campo is there to see their departure, and to admire or criticise, as the case may be. After dinner, when everyone has tasted the good wine and enjoyed the good fare, the feast breaks up with cries of Viva la novizza! followed by songs, stories, laughter, and much flirtation between the girls and boys, who make the most of the freedom of intercourse conceded to them in honour of the day. Then the music begins, the table is whisked away, and the assembled guests join lustily in the dance; the women perhaps, singing at intervals, "Enôta, enôta, enìo!" a burden borne over to Venice from the Grecian shore. The romance is finished; Marieta and Nane are married, the zornada santa wanes to its close, the tired dancers accompany the bride to the threshold of her new home, and so adieu!

Before leaving the subject of Venetian love-songs it may be as well to glance at a few points characteristic of the popular mind which it has not been convenient to touch upon in following the Venetian youth and maiden from the prima radice of their love to its consecration at the altar. What, for instance, does the Venetian singer say of poverty and riches?—for there is no surer test of character than the way of regarding money and the lack of it. It is taken pretty well for granted at Venice as elsewhere, that inequality of fortune is a bar to matrimony. The poor girl says to her better-to-do lover, "Thou passest this way sad and grieving, thou thinkest to speak to my father, and on thy finger thou dost carry a little ring. But thy thought does not fall in with my thought, and thy thought is not worth a gazette. Thou art rich and I am a poor little one!" Here the girl puts all faith in the good intentions of her suitor: it is not his fault if her poverty divides them; it is the nature of things, against which there is no appeal. But there is more than one song that betrays the suspicion that if a girl grows poor her lover will be only too eager and ready to desert her. "My lady mother has always told me that she who falls into poverty loses her lover; loses friend and loses hope. The purse does not sing when there is no coin in it." Still, on the whole, a more high-minded view prevails. "Do not look to my being a poor man," says one lover,

Che povatà no guasta gentilissa,

—"for poverty does not spoil or prevent gentle manners." A girl sings, "All tell me that I am poor, the world's honour is my riches; I am poor, I am of fair fame; poor both of us, let us make love." One is reminded of "how the good wife taught her daughter" in the old English poem of the fifteenth century:

I pray the, my dere childe, loke thou bere the so well

That alle men may seyen thou art so trewe as stele;

Gode name is golde worth, my leve childe!

A brave little Venetian maiden cries: "How many there are who desire fortune! and I, poor little thing, desire it not. This is the fortune I desire, to wed a youth of twenty-one years." One lover pines for riches, but only that he may offer them to his beloved: "Fair Marieta, I wish to make my fortune, to go where the Turk has his cradle, and work myself nearly to death, so that afterwards I may come back to thee, my fair one, and marry thee." Finally, a town youth says that if his country love has but a milk-pail for her dowry, what matters?

De dota la me dà quel viso belo!

The Venetian displays no marked enthusiasm for fair hair, notwithstanding the fame of Giorgione's sunset heads and the traditional expedients by which Venetian ladies of past times sought to bring their dark locks into conformity with that painter's favourite hue. In Venetian songs there is nothing about the "golden spun silk" of Sicily; if a Venetian folk-poet does speak of fair hair, he calls it by the common-place generic term of blond. The available evidence goes rather to show that in his own heart he prefers a brunette. "My lady mother always told me that I should never be enamoured of white roses," says a sententious young man; "she told me that I should love the little mulberries, which are sweeter than honey." "Cara mora," mora, or mulberry, meaning brunette, is an ordinary caressing term. Two frank young people carry on this dialogue: "Will you come to me, fair maid?" "No; I will not come, for I am fair." "If you are fair, I am no less so; if you are the rose, I am the spotless lily." Beauty, therefore, is valued, especially by the possessors of it. But the Venetian admits the possibility of that which Keats found so hard to comprehend—the love of the plain. A girl says, and it is a pretty saying, "Se no so bela, ghe piaso al mio amore" ("If I am not fair, I please my beloved"). A soldier, whose morosa dies, does not weep for her beauty, for she was not beautiful; nor for her riches, for she was not rich; he weeps for her sweet manners and conversation—it was that that made him love her. The universal weakness for a little flattery from the hand of the portrait-painter is expressed in a sprightly little song:

What does it matter if I am not fair,

Who have a lover, who a painter is?

He will portray me like a star, I wis;

What does it matter if I am not fair?

We hear a good deal of lovers' quarrels, and of the transitoriness of love. "Oh! God! how the sky is overcast! It seems about to rain, and then it passes; so is it with a man in love; he loves a fair woman, and then he leaves her." That is her version of the affair. He has not anything complimentary to say: "If I get out of this squall alive, never more shall woman in the world befool me. I have been befooled upon a pledge of sacred faith: mad is the man who believes in women." Another man says, with more serious bitterness: "What time have I not lost in loving you! Had I lost it in saying so many prayers, I should have found favour before God, and my mother would have blessed me." A matter-of-fact girl remarks, "No one will grow thin on your account, nor will any one die on mine." When her lover says that he has sent her his heart in a basket, she replies that she sends back both basket and heart, being in want of neither; and if he should really happen to die, she unfeelingly meditates, "My love is dead, and I have not wept; I had thought to suffer more torment. A Pope dies, another is made; not otherwise do I weep for my love."

Certain vocations are looked upon with suspicion:

Sailor's trade—at sea to die!

Merchant's trade—that's bankruptcy;

Gambler's trade in cursing ends,

Thief's trade to the gallows sends.

But in spite of the second line about "l'arte del mercante," a girl does not much mind marrying a merchant or shopkeeper; nay, it is sometimes her avowed ambition:

I want no fisher with a fishy smell,

A market gardener would not suit me well;

Nor yet a mariner who sails the sea:

A fine flour-merchant is the man for me.

A miller seems to think that he stands a good chance: "Come to the window, Columbine! I am that miller who brought thee, the other evening, the pure white flour." Shoemakers are in very bad odour: "I calegheri ga na trista fama." Fishermen are considered poor penniless folk, and she who weds a sailor, does so at her peril:

L'amor del mariner no dura un 'ora,

La dove che lu el và, lu s' inamora.

And even if the sailor's troth can be trusted, is it not his trade "at sea to die"? But the young girl will not be persuaded. "All say to me, 'Beauty, do not take the mariner, for he will make thee die;' if he make me die, so must it be; I will wed him, for he is my soul." And when he is gone, she sings: "My soul, as thou art beyond the port, send me word if thou art alive or dead, if the waters of the sea have taken thee?" She returns sadly to her work, the work of all Venetian maidens:

My love is far and far away from me,

I am at home, and he has gone to sea;

He is at sea, and he has sails to spread,

I am at home, and I have beads to thread.

The boatman's love can afford to sing in a lighter strain; there is not the shadow of interminable voyages upon her. "I go out on the balcony, I see Venice, and I see my joy, who starts; I go out on the balcony, I see the sea, and I see my love, who rows." Another song is perhaps a statement of fact, though it sounds like a poetic fancy:

To-night their boats must seek the sea,

One night his boat will linger yet;

They bear a freight of wood, and he

A freight of rose and violet.

Who forgets the coming into Venice in the early morning light of the boats laden with fresh flowers and fruit?

Isaac d'Israeli states that the fishermen's wives of the Lido, particularly those of the districts of Malamocca and Pelestrina (its extreme end), sat along the shore in the evenings while the men were out fishing, and sang stanzas from Tasso and other songs at the pitch of their voices, going on till each one could distinguish the responses of her own husband in the distance.

At first sight the songs of the various Italian provinces appear to be greatly alike, but at first sight only. Under further examination they display essential differences, and even the songs which travel all over Italy almost always receive some distinctive touch of local colour in the districts where they obtain naturalisation. The Venetian poet has as strongly marked an identity as any of his fellows. Not to speak of his having invented the four-lined song known as the "Vilota," the quality of his work unmistakably reflects his peculiar idiosyncracies. An Italian writer has said, "nella parola e nello scritto ognuno imita sè stesso;" and the Venetian "imitates himself" faithfully enough in his verses. He has a well-developed sense of humour, and his finer wit discerns less objectionable paths than those of parody and burlesque, for which the Sicilian shows so fatal a leaning. He is often in a mood of half-playful cynicism; if his paramount theme is love, he is yet fully inclined to have a laugh at the expense of the whole race of lovers:

A feast I will prepare for love to eat,

Non-suited suitors I will ask to dine;

They shall have pain and sorrow for their meat,

They shall have tears and sobs to drink for wine;

And sighs shall be the servitors most fit

To wait at table where the lovers sit.

As compared with the Tuscan, the Venetian is a confirmed egotist. While the former well-nigh effaces his individual personality out of his hymns of adoration, the latter is apt to talk so much of his private feelings, his wishes, his disappointments, that the idol stands in danger of being forgotten. There is, indeed, a single song—the song of one of the despised mariners—which combines the sweet humility of Tuscan lyrics with a glow and fervour truly Venetian—possibly its author was in reality some Istriot seaman, for the canti popolari of Istria are known to partake of both styles. Anyhow, it may figure here, justified by what seems to me its own excellence of conception:

Fair art thou born, but love is not for me;

A sailor's calling sends me forth to sea.

I do desire to paint thee on my sail,

And o'er the briny deep I'd carry thee.

They ask, What ensign? when the boat they hail—

For woman's love I bear this effigy;

For woman's love, for love of maiden fair;

If her I may not love, I love forswear!

When he is most in earnest and most excited, the Venetian is still homely—he has none of the Sicilian's luxuriant imagination. I may call to mind a remark of Edgar Poe's to the effect that passion demands a homeliness of expression. Passionate the Venetian poet certainly is. Never a man was readier to "dare e'en death" at the behest of his mistress—