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Winter vexed the meadow
Many weary hours:

Fled his chill and shadow,

Lo, the fields are laughing

Red with flowers.1

Or the song at the dance may set forth some of the preliminaries, as when a girl is supposed to sing:

CARE and sorrow, fly away!

On the green field let us play,
Playmates gentle, playmates mine,
Where we see the bright flowers shine.

I say to thee, I say to thee,

Playmate mine, O come with me!

Gracious Love, to me incline,
Make for me a garland fine,—
Garland for the man to wear
Who can please a maiden fair.

I say to thee, I say to thee,
Playmate mine, O come with me!"

The greeting from youth to maiden, from maiden to youth, was doubtless a favorite bit of folk-song, whether at the dance or as independent lyric. Readers of the 'Library' will find such a greeting incorporated in 'Child Maurice'; only there it is from the son to his mother, and with a somewhat eccentric list of comparisons by way of detail, instead of the terse form known to German tradition:

Soar, Lady Nightingale, soar above!

A hundred thousand times greet my love!

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The variations are endless; one of the earliest is found in a charming Latin tale of the eleventh century, Rudlieb,' "the oldest known romance in European literature." A few German words are mixed with the Latin; while after the good old ballad way the greeting is first given to the messenger, and repeated when the messenger performs his task:—“I wish thee as much joy as there are leaves on the trees, and as much delight as birds have, so much love (minna), —and as much honor I wish thee as there are flowers and grass!" Competent critics regard this as a current folk-song of greeting inserted in the romance, and therefore as the oldest example of minnesang in German literature. Of the less known variations of this

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theme, one may be given from the German of an old song where male singers are supposed to compete for a garland presented by the maidens; the rivals not only sing for the prize but even answer riddles. It is a combination of game and dance, and is evidently of communal origin. The honorable authorities of Freiburg, about 1556, put this practice of "dancing of evenings in the streets, and singing for a garland, and dancing in a throng" under strictest ban. The following is a stanza of greeting in such a song:

Maiden, thee I fain would greet,
From thy head unto thy feet.
As many times I greet thee even
As there are stars in yonder heaven,
As there shall blossom flowers gay,
From Easter to St. Michael's day!1

These competitive verses for the dance and the garland were, as we shall presently see, spontaneous: composed in the throng by lad or lassie, they are certainly entitled to the name of communal lyric. Naturally, the greeting could ban as well as bless; and little Kirstin (Christina) in the Danish ballad sends a greeting of double charge:— To Denmark's King wish as oft good-night

As stars are shining in heaven bright;

To Denmark's Queen as oft bad year

As the linden hath leaves or the hind hath hair!2

Folk-song in the primitive stage always had a refrain or chorus. The invocation of spring, met in so many songs of later time, is doubtless a survival of an older communal chorus sung to deities of summer and flooding sunshine and fertility. The well-known Latin 'Pervigilium Veneris,' artistic and elaborate as it is in eulogy of spring and love, owes its refrain and the cadence of its trochaic rhythm to some song of the Roman folk in festival; so that Walter Pater is not far from the truth when he gracefully assumes that the whole poem was suggested by this refrain "caught from the lips of the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa," during that Indian summer of paganism under the Antonines. This haunting refrain, with its throb of the spring and the festal throng, is ruthlessly tortured into a heroic couplet in Parnell's translation:

Let those love now who never loved before:

Let those who always loved now love the more.

Contrast the original!.

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet!

'Uhland, Volkslieder,' i. 12.

'Grundtvig, 'Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser,' iii. 161.

This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome and the near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different speech from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own songs withal; a few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song about Cæsar, have come down to us.1

The refrain itself, of whatever metre, was imitated by classical poets like Catullus; and the earliest traditions of Greece tell of these refrains, with gathering verses of lyric or narrative character, sung in the harvest-field and at the dance. In early Assyrian poetry, even, the refrain plays an important part; while an Egyptian folksong, sung by the reapers, seems to have been little else than a refrain. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, courtly poets took up the refrain, experimented with it, refined it, and so developed those highly artificial forms of verse known as roundel, triolet, and ballade. The refrain, in short, is corner-stone for all poetry of the people, if not of poetry itself; beginning with inarticulate cries of joy or sorrow, like the eya noted above, mere emotional utterances or imitations of various sounds, then growing in distinctness and compass, until the separation of choral from artistic poetry, and the increasing importance of the latter, reduced the refrain to a merely ancillary function, and finally did away with it altogether. Many refrains are still used for the dance which are mere exclamations, with just enough coherence of words added to make them pass as poetry. Frequently, as in the French, these have a peculiar beauty. Victor Hugo has imitated them with success; but to render them into English is impossible.

The refrain, moreover, is closely allied to those couplets or quatrains composed spontaneously at the dance or other merry-making of the people. In many parts of Germany, the dances of harvest

1 We cannot widen our borders so as to include that solitary folk-song rescued from ancient Greek literature, the 'Song of the Swallow,' sung by children of the Island of Rhodes as they went about asking gifts from house to house at the coming of the earliest swallow. The metre is interesting in comparison with the rhythm of later European folk-songs, and there is evident dramatic action. Nor can we include the fragments of communal drama found in the favorite Debates Between Summer and Winter,- from the actual contest, to such lyrical forms as the song at the end of Shakespeare's 'Love's Labor's Lost.' The reader may be reminded of a good specimen of this class in Ivy and Holly,' printed by Ritson, 'Ancient Songs and Ballads,' Hazlitt's edition, page 114 ff., with the refrain:

Nay, Ivy, nay,

Hyt shal not be, I wys;
Let Holy hafe the maystry,
As the maner ys.

were until recent days enlivened by the so-called schnaderhüpfl, a quatrain sung to a simple air, composed on the spot, and often inclining to the personal and the satiric. In earlier days this power to make a quatrain off-hand seems to have been universal among the peasants of Europe. In Scandinavia such quatrains are known as stev. They are related, so far as their spontaneity, their universal character, and their origin are concerned, to the coplas of Spain, the stornelli of Italy, and the distichs of modern Greece. Of course, the specimens of this poetry which can be found now are rude enough; for the life has gone out of it, and to find it at its best one must go back to conditions which brought the undivided genius of the community into play. What one finds nowadays is such motley as this, a so-called rundâ from Vogtland, answering to the Bavarian schnader hüpfl:

I and my Hans,

We go to the dance;

And if no one will dance,

Dance I and my Hans!

A schnaderhüpfl taken down at Appenzell in 1754, and one of the oldest known, was sung by some lively girl as she danced at the reapers' festival: :

Mine, mine, mine,- O my love is fine,

And my favor shall he plainly see;

Till the clock strike eight, till the clock strike nine,

My door, my door shall open be.

It is evident that the great mass of this poetry died with the occasion that brought it forth, or lingered in oral tradition, exposed to a thousand chances of oblivion. The Church made war upon these songs, partly because of their erotic character, but mainly, one may assume, because of the chain of tradition from heathen times which linked them with feasts in honor of abhorred gods, and with rustic dances at the old pagan harvest-home. A study of all this, however, with material at a minimum, and conjecture or philological combination as the only possible method of investigation, must be relegated to the treatise and the monograph;1 for present purposes we must confine our exposition and search to songs that shall attract readers as well as students. Yet this can be done only by the admission into our pages of folk-song which already bears witness, more or less, to the touch of an artist working upon material once exclusively communal and popular.

1 Folk-lore, mythology, sociology even, must share in this work. The reader may consult for indirect but valuable material such books as Frazer's 'Golden Bough,' or that admirable treatise, Tylor's Primitive Culture.'

Returning to our English type, the 'Cuckoo Song,' we are now to ask what other communal lyrics with this mark upon them, denoting at once rescue and contamination at the hands of minstrel or wandering clerk, have come down to us from the later Middle Ages. Having answered this question, it will remain to deal with the difficult material accumulated in comparatively recent times. Ballads are far easier to preserve than songs. Ballads have a narrative; and this story in them has proved antiseptic, defying the chances of oral transmission. A good story travels far, and the path which it wanders from people to people is often easy to follow; but the more volatile contents of the popular lyric - we are not speaking of its tune, which is carried in every direction are easily lost.' Such a lyric lives chiefly by its sentiment, and sentiment is a fragile burden. We can however get some notion of this communal song by process of inference, for the earliest lays of the Provençal troubadour, and probably of the German minnesinger, were based upon the older song of the country-side. Again, in England there was little distinction made between the singer who entertained court and castle and the gleeman who sang in the villages and at rural festivals; the latter doubtless taking from the common stock more than he contributed from his own. A certain proof of more aristocratic and distinctly artistic, that is to say, individual origin, and a conclusive reason for refusing the name of folk-song to any one of these lyrics of love, is the fact that it happens to address a married woman. Every one knows that the troubadour and the minnesinger thus addressed their lays; and only the style and general character of their earliest poetry can be considered as borrowed from the popular muse. In other words, however vivacious, objective, vigorous, may be the early lays of the troubadour, however one is tempted to call them mere modifications of an older folk-song, they are excluded by this characteristic from the popular lyric and belong to poetry of the schools. Marriage, says Jeanroy, is always respected in the true folk-song. Moreover, this is only a negative test. In Portugal, many songs which must be referred to the individual and courtly poet are written in praise of the unmarried girl; while in England, whether it be set down to austere morals or to the practical turn of the native mind, one finds little or nothing to match this troubadour and minnesinger poetry in honor of the stately but capricious dame.' The folk-song

1 For early times translation from language to language is out of the question, certainly in the case of lyrics. It is very important to remember that primitive man regarded song as a momentary and spontaneous thing.

2 Yet even rough Scandinavia took up this brilliant but doubtful love poetry. To one of the Norse kings is attributed a song in which the royal singer informs his "lady" by way of credentials for his wooing,-"I have struck a blow in the Saracen's land; let thy husband do the same!»

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