A Corsican mother says to the infant at her breast, "Thou art my guardian angel!"—which is the same thought spoken in another way.
The most lovely of all sad lullabies is that written much more than two thousand years ago by Simonides of Ceos. Acrisius, king of Argos, was informed by an oracle that he would be killed by the son of his daughter Danaë, who was therefore shut up in a tower, where Zeus visited her in the form of a shower of gold. Afterwards, when she gave birth to Perseus, Acrisius ordered mother and child to be exposed in a wicker chest or coffin on the open sea. This is the story which Simonides took as the subject of his poem:
Whilst the wind blew and rattled on the decorated ark, and the troubled deep tossed as though in terror—her own fair cheek also not unwet—around Perseus Danaë threw her arms, and cried: "O how grievous, my child, is my trouble; yet thou sleepest, and with tranquil heart slumberest within this joyless house, beneath the brazen-barred, black-gleaming, musky heavens. Ah! little reckest thou, beloved object, of the howling of the tempest, nor of the brine wetting thy delicate hair, as there thou liest, clad in thy little crimson mantle! But even were this dire pass dreadful also to thee, yet lend thy soft ear to my words: Sleep on, my babe, I say; sleep on, I charge thee; nay, let the wild waters sleep, and sleep the immeasurable woe. Let me, too, see some change of will on thy part, Zeus, father! or if the speech be deemed too venturous, then, for thy child's sake, I pray thee pardon."
This is not a folk-song, but it has a prescriptive right to a place among lullabies.
Passing over the beautiful Widow's Song, quoted in a former essay, we come to some Basque lines, which bring before us the blank and vulgar ugliness of modern misery with a realism that would please M. Zola:
Hush, poor child, hush thee to sleep;
(See him lying in slumber deep!)
Thou first, then following I,
We will hush and hushaby.