And I had, I had a lover once,
I would I had him yet.
There is a pretty little English ballad called The Unquiet Grave,[[1039]] which begins in the same tone:—
The wind doth blow to-day, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain....
and the ballad goes on with a dialogue between the lover and his dead sweetheart.[[1040]] On the other hand, amœbean forms of the schnaderhüpfl could easily lead to such alternate stanzas as one finds in the pretty ballad, common in France, to which Child supplies “a base-born” English cousin, The Twa Magicians,[[1041]] with a catching refrain suggestive of the dance. So plain is the connection between these schnaderhüpfl, the stev of Norway, all similar isolated quatrains, and the actual songs of situation, question, and answer, that Landstad declared for the quatrains as débris of longer poems. But Gustav Meyer[[1042]] is surely right in his energetic rejection of this way of looking at the process; his proof seems convincing to a degree. Nobody will say that the artistic lyric as we have it, or even the later communal ballad, is made by direct union of scattered stanzas; but it seems clear enough that these isolated quatrains furnish the material for such poems, and that part of the process could be achieved in the grouping of quatrains improvised about a common subject and on a communal occasion. Those repeated questions why the forsaken lass is crying, still echo in a lyric like Scott’s Jock of Hazeldean:—
Why weep ye by the tide, lady,
Why weep ye by the tide?