E quante primavera foglie adorna
Che sì vaga e gentile a noi ritorna.
The Bulgarian sees a mountain trembling to the song of three nightingales. Like his Servian neighbours, he must always have a story, and here is his nightingale story. Marika went into the garden; she passed the pomegranate-tree and the apple-tree, and sat her down under the red rose-tree to embroider a white handkerchief. In the rose-tree was a nightingale, and the nightingale said: "Let us sing, Marika; if you sing better than I, you shall cut off my wings at the shoulders and my feet at the knee; if I sing better than you, I will cut off your hair at the roots." They sang for two days, for three days; Marika sang the best. Then the nightingale pleaded, "Marika, fair young girl, do not cut off my feet, let me keep my wings, for I have three little nightingales to rear, and of one of them I will make you a gift." "Nightingale, sweet singer," said Marika, "I will give thee grace of thy wings, and even of thy feet; go, tend thy little ones, make me a gift of one to lull me to sleep, and of one to awake me."
We may take leave of bird-lays with the pretty old Bourbonnaise chanson:—
Derrier' chez nous, il y a-t-un vert bocage,
Le rossignol y chant' tous les jours;
Là il y dit en son charmant langage:
Les amoreux sont malheureux toujours!
Flowers, the green leaves and the grass, are suggestive of two kinds of pathos. The individual flower, the grass or leaf of any one day or spring-tide, becomes the type of the transitoriness of beauty and youth and life. "Sing whilst ye are young and fair, soon you will be slighted, as are sere lilies," is the song even of happy Tuscany. To the Sclav it seems a question whether it be worth while that there should be any flowers or morning gladness, since they must be gone so soon. "O my garden," sings the Ruthenian, "O my little garden, my garden and my green vine, why bloomest thou in the morning? Hardly bloomed, thou art withered, and the earth is strewn with thy leaves." The other kind of pathos springs from a deeper well. Man passes by, each one hurries to his tragedy; Nature smiles tranquilly on. This moving force of contrast was known to Lywarch Hen, and to those Keltic bards who dived so deep into Nature's secrets that scarcely a greater depth has been fathomed by any after-comers. It was perceived involuntarily by the English ballad-singers, who strung a burden of "Fine flowers" upon a tale of infanticide, and bade blackbird and mavis sing their sweetest between a murder and an execution. And it is this that gives its key-note to an Armenian popular song of singular power. A bishop tells how he has made himself a vineyard; he has brought stones from the valleys and raised a wall around it; he has planted young vines and plentifully has he watered their roots. Every morning the nightingale sings sweetly to the rose. Every morning Gabriel says to his soul: "Rise and come forth from this vineyard, from this newly-built vineyard." He has not eaten the fruit of the vine; he has built a wine-vat, but the wine he has not tasted; he has brought cool streams from the hills, but he has not drunk the water thereof; he has planted red and white roses, but he has not smelt their fragrance. The turtle-dove sings to the birds, and the spring is come. Gabriel calls to his soul, the light of his eyes grows dim; "It is time I leave my vineyard, my beautiful vineyard." There is hardly another poem treating of death which is so un-illuminated by one ray from a future dawn.
In the great mass of folk-songs flowers are dealt with simply as the accessories to all beautiful things. The folk-poet learns from them his alphabet of beauty. Go into any English cornfield after harvest; whilst the elder children glean wheat ears, the children of two and three years glean small yellow hearts-eases, vervaine, and blue scabious. They are as surely learning to distinguish the Beautiful as the student in the courts of the Vatican. Through life, when these children think of a beautiful thing, the thought of a flower will not be far off. Religion and love, after all the two chief embellishments of the life of the poor, have been hung about with flowers from the past of Persephone and Freya till to-day. Even in England the common people are glad if they can find a lily of the valley to carry to church at Whitsuntide, and the first sign that a country girl has got a sweetheart is often to be read in the transformation of the garden-plot before her door. In Italy you will not walk far among the vineyards and maize-fields without coming upon a shrine which bears traces of floral decoration. Some Italian villages and country towns have their special flower festival, or Infiorata; Genzano, for instance, where, on the eighth day after Corpus Domini, innumerable flowers are stripped of their petals, which are sorted out according to colour and then arranged in patterns on the way to the church, the magnificence of the effect going far to make one condone the heartlessness of immolating so many victims to achieve an hour's triumph. A charge of stupid indifference to beauty has been brought against the Italian peasant—it would seem partly on the score that he has been known to root up his anemones in order to put a stop to the inroads of foreign marauders. There are certain persons, law-abiding in the land which gave them birth, who when abroad, adopt the ethics of our tribal ancestors. A piece of ground, a tree, or a plant not enclosed by a wall, is turned by this strange public to its own uses. A walnut tree by the wayside has a stick thrown among its branches to fetch down the walnuts. The peasant does what he can to protect himself. He observes that flowers attract trespassers, and so he roots up the flowers. There are Italian folk-songs which show a delight in flowers not to be surpassed anywhere. Flower-loving beyond all the rest are the Tuscan poets, whose love-lyrics have been truly described as "tutti seminati di fiori"—all sown with lilies, clove pinks, and jessamine. The fact fits in pleasantly with the legend of the first Florentines, who are said to have called their city after "the great basket of flowers" in which it was built. It fits in, too, with the sentiment attached even now to the very name of Florence. The old Floraja in the overgrown straw hat at the railway station can reckon on something more abiding than her long-lost charms to find her patrons; and it is curious to note how few of the passengers reject the proffered emblems of the flower town, or fail to earn the parting wish "Felice ritorno!"