‘O cursed mother, heaven’s high,
And that’s where thou will ne’er win nigh.
11.
‘O cursed mother, hell is deep,
And there thou’ll enter step by step.’
CHILD WATERS
The Text is here given from the Percy Folio, with some emendations as suggested by Child.
The Story, if we omit the hard tests imposed on the maid’s affection, is widely popular in a series of Scandinavian ballads,—Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian; and Percy’s edition (in the Reliques) was popularised in Germany by Bürger’s translation.
The disagreeable nature of the final insult (stt. 27-29), retained here only for the sake of fidelity to the original text, may be paralleled by the similarly sudden lapse of taste in the Nut-Brown Maid. We can but hope—as indeed is probable—that the objectionable lines are in each case interpolated.