I’m not your Darby,
And you’re not my Joan.
Similarly there comes from Carinthia a challenge of youth to youth, with audible lilt of the dance, too often prelude to a grim struggle not in Touchstone’s version of the code, but based on Touchstone’s theory of “mine own”:—
You will not, you will not my lassie be loving,
You will not, you will not a simpleton be;
You’ll have to, you’ll have to go find you another,
You know well, you know well my lass is for me!
What now is to prevent these quatrains, whether in question and answer, or in a succession of related and varied harpings on one theme, to form a little poem, a lyric? Professor Brandl says it does not so happen, as if solitude and paper and emotion at second hand always had to be in the case; facts, however, say that the process is not only probable in theory but definitely before one on the record. To begin with, a quatrain of undoubted communal origin, a genuine schnaderhüpfl, often finds its way into a folksong; so with this from Alsace:[[1038]]—
’Tis not so long ago it rained,
The trees are dripping yet;