The songs from Ossian tell of departed ancestors and heroes. The sentiment expressed is universal.
From Shakespeare appears such things as Hamlet’s Probe einer schauderhaften Metaphysik über Tod und Leben.
Macbeths schreckliche Dolchscene; is there any human breast in which the sentiments involved in these deep reflections have not sometimes found a place?
Now it is what Herder himself says in introducing these selections from Shakespeare which justifies us in making the content, the theme of his whole collection of Volk songs, the common ground upon which they all meet.
“In Shakespear gibts von jeder kleinen Nuance der menschlichen Denkart und Stimme Proben oder vielmehr lebende Naturartungen: und so fange das berühmte Selbstgespräch Hamlets an, was man schon Prosaisch in unsrer Sprache hat.”
Herder’s collection of Volk poetry embraces as themes: love, war, religion, domestic life, idyllic scenes, vengeance, court life, ghost tales, fairy tales, marriage, mythology, phenomena of nature, death, personified nature, freedom, the dance, the seasons, and hero and ancestral veneration.
These embody sentiments universal among mankind; feelings which are fundamental in the human breast; thoughts which are innate in humanity. That which is universal, fundamental, and innate is natural. These songs find a response among the people from whom they arose because these people are products of unhampered nature. Both rhythm and content lead to this conclusion according to Herder’s conception. Volk as seen from this angle, then, are either a primitive people or a group within a people representing advanced stages of civilization, which group has still retained the methods of thinking, the feelings, the modes of expression, and the tastes of primitive people.
We get from Herder’s collection of Volkslieder, then, two conceptions of Volk: (1) Volk, a collective personality resulting from the development of individual consciousness into community individuality and consciousness; (2) Volk, a primitive people or, within a civilized nation, a section, which has maintained certain natural fundamental and primitive characteristics.