"There was a knicht riding frae the east—
Jennifer gentle and rosemarie—
Who had been wooing at monie a place—
As the dew flies over the mulberry tree."
Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists.
Thus Tennyson in "The Sisters":
"We were two sisters of one race,
The wind is howling in turret and tree;
_ _She was the fairer in the face,
O the earl was fair to see."
While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S. Calverley:
"The auld wife sat at her ivied door,
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
A thing she had frequently done before;
And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees.
"The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese),
And I met with a ballad, I can't say where,
Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6]
A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song species of repetend so familiar in ballad language:
"She had na pu'd a double rose,
a rose but only twa."
"They had na sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three.
"How will I come up? How can I come up?
How can I come to thee?"