"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."