Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forbode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

CHAPTER VI

THE BALLAD

I knew a very wise man that believed that. if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun

THE ballad, unlike the song, is not lyric but narrative. It is not the expression of a poet's mood or emotion, but the story of a bold deed, a dramatic incident, a chase, or a fight. In the lyric the poet tries to express his own feelings as completely as possible; in the ballad he effaces himself in order that his characters may occupy the front of the stage.

The ballad is the short story of poetry; yet, unlike the prose short story, which of all the important literary types is the youngest, the ballad is among the most ancient. Only the folk-song is equally old. The ballad is older than the Iliad and the Odyssey; in fact, these epics had their beginnings in the ballad. The merits of a good ballad are much the same as those of the prose short story. The characters and incidents must be interesting; and the story must be vivid, spirited, full of movement and action. The brevity of the ballad, however, compels its author to select a simpler story and to tell it more directly and more rapidly than he would tell

it in prose. The limitations of poetic language, moreover, force him to suggest rather than describe in detail his characters and his background.

Ballads are of two distinct types: the popular, or folk, ballad; and the literary, or artistic, ballad. The literary ballad is the work of one author, a known individual; the popular ballad is the work of unknown authors, so numerous and so obscure that we call it the work of the people. The popular ballad is much the older of the two types; and it is often, as we shall presently see, the inspiration of the literary ballad.

In the earliest stage the popular ballad appears to have been, like the folk-song, always chanted or sung, often perhaps to the accompaniment of a dance. Traces of this connection of the ballad with music are to be seen in the choruses and refrains which some of the ballads preserve. Just how the ballads were composed, we do not know; and authorities disagree rather violently. The orthodox theory is that they were composed by a singing, dancing group. Professor Louise Pound, of the University of Nebraska, has attacked this theory in her interesting Poetic Origins and the Ballad. Her theory is that the ballads were written by individual authors, as in later poetry. However the ballads may have been originally composed, there is no doubt that they owe their chief stylistic characteristics to the way in which they have been handed down. Every one who has played the old game of Gossip knows that few persons can accurately repeat a verbal message of any length. One word or phrase replaces another until, by the time the sentence has gone round the circle, it seldom bears any resem

blance to the original message. The popular ballads have been handed down from generation to generation without being written down. Consequently, so many changes have crept into them that nearly all individual traces of the original author-if, indeed, the ballad was ever the work of one man-have vanished. The ballad has taken on something from all who have repeated it; so that we may truthfully say it is the work not of one man but of the people. The style of the popular ballad, as a result of this process of transmission, is impersonal, simple, and direct. The ballad rings true because it is the poem of a race and not the unrepresentative work of one man.

The popular ballads are poetry of the people, by the people, and for the people; they belong to a time when all people loved poetry. They are the work of those who had no other literature. American cowboys, miners, lumbermen, and mountaineers, cut off from books, newspapers, and theaters, have composed or borrowed ballads, set them to old airs, and sung them. The ballads of the Scottish border originated doubtless in much the same way. Such primitive poetry often possesses the power of pleasing even the cultivated reader. Of the ballad of "Chevy Chase" the scholarly Sir Philip Sidney wrote, “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart more moved than with a trumpet." Over a century later Addison wrote of the same ballad, "It is impossible that anything should be universally tasted and approved by a multitude, though they are the rabble of a nation, which hath not in it some peculiar aptness to please and gratify the mind of man.”

When the people in isolated districts come into contact

with a higher civilization, they gradually give up their splendid ballads for songs of a very inferior kind. Thus, in our own country, the cowboys and the negroes are giving up such ballads as "Joe Bowser" and "Frankie was a Good Woman" for worthless songs from the vaudeville stage. In the same way some of the finest of the old British ballads have been irrecoverably lost. In England there was little interest in ballad-collecting until Bishop Percy published in 1765 his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Percy's collection enormously stimulated the interest of scholars and poets in this poetry of the people. Since his time many of the great English poets,-among them Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti, and Kipling,— have found in the old ballads inspiration for literary ballads of great merit.

The popular ballad tells its story with the smallest possible amount of description and characterization. As in the drama, the characters reveal themselves by what they say and do. In the following ballad, "Lord Randal," none of the three characters is described, and the sweetheart is not even present ;yet mother, son, and sweetheart all stand clearly revealed in the dialogue between mother and son. The mother's-and the reader's-suspicions are gradually aroused, but not until the last stanza is the tragic event made clear. With this climax the poem closes, at just the right moment and with exactly the right emphasis. This ballad, though it seems to have originated in England or Scotland, has also been found in various parts of America. The word down is here pronounced so as to rime with soon. The ballad is written in anapestic tetrameter couplets.