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 va.s.sal 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 n.o.ble 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 "pa.s.sing" 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.ble "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 n.o.ble 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 la.s.seru per testament Ch "a mi sotero an val d" Luserna, An val d" Luserna a m sotraran Dova l me cor 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, pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ds, "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 superst.i.tions, 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 a.n.a.logy 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 a.s.sociation 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 encompa.s.s.
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 ma.s.ses of sea-born cloud sweeping on and up at dawn or sunset, till, finding their pa.s.sage 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, "G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, when the forest is clad again in leaves and the earth in gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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 sh.o.r.es 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 gra.s.s. "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 na.s.se 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 aetna 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 peac.o.c.k"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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sing 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 e mezza compagnia," runs a Tuscan proverb: "Light is half company." In a memorable pa.s.sage, 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 b.u.t.terfly. 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, b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terfly, 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. b.u.t.terflies, to most of us, are but ethereal strangers; so by the ma.s.ses they are not valued--at least, not in Europe. A tribe of West African negroes have this beautiful saying: "The b.u.t.terfly praises G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 _prima 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 c.o.c.k 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 pa.s.ses almost for a dumb bird. Very rarely in England do we hear her notes, soft yet penetrating, like the high-pitched whisper of the aeolian 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 pa.s.sage, 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?