[593]. Ibid., p. 198.
[594]. Wallaschek, Prim. Mus., p. 199. It is needless to insist on the custom of dancing at funerals, and, in memorial rites, over the graves of the dead; mediæval councils were full of warning against this habit. The “dance of death,” of course, became symbolic and artistic.
[595]. Denied as a literal fact, as an affair of government and authority, the matriarchate, so called, is sufficiently proved as the early form of family life.
[596]. As the clan or horde had its song of triumph, and this is echoed and prolonged in “national” songs like the Marseillaise, or, better, the Ça ira, so the clan grief can expand into a national lament. Something of this sort is found in that wail over the downfall of their power sung by the Moors in Spain and so potent to stir the heart that it was forbidden by government; its refrain, Woe is me, Alhama, has all the iterated passion of grief that one finds in the primitive vocero. Then there is the song or psalm of the captives in Babylon,—and the list could be extended indefinitely.
[597]. The story is at first hand.
[598]. Work quoted, II. 324.
[599]. Account of Shelley’s last days, quoted in Harper’s Magazine, April, 1892, p. 786.
[600]. Schoolcraft, III. 326, “Poetic Development of the Indian Mind.”—For a good collection of facts about iterated words as song, see the sixth chapter of Wallaschek’s Primitive Music. For example, p. 173, “The Macusi Indians in Guiana amuse themselves for hours with singing a monotonous song, whose words, hai-a, hai-a, have no further significance.” See also pp. 54, 56 f.
[601]. Report Proceed. Numism. and Antiquar. Soc., Philadelphia, 1887, pp. 18 f. (Printed 1891.)
[602]. Lectures, as quoted, II. 117, speaking of poetry before Homer. On the origin of poetry in unintelligible sounds, see Ragusa-Moleti, Poesie dei Popoli Selvaggi, Torino-Palermo, 1891, pp. vi ff., and Jacobowski, Anfänge der Poesie, p. 66, who assumes that early man held fast to those tones and gestures which expressed an original sensation or emotion. On the repetition of mere sounds to express emotion, see Alice C. Fletcher, Journal American Folklore, April-June, 1898, p. 87.