And Sall with ghost for lover.
But soon as ever sun shone sweet,
And birds sang, Praise for rain, O—
Leapt out of bed three pair of feet
And danced on earth again, O!
[17.] Old May Song.
This, like No. 2, and the next song must be as old as the dew-ponds on the Downs. They were wont to be sung, I have read, by five or six men, with a fiddle, or flute, or clarionet accompaniment. When I was a boy I can remember one First of May seeing a Jack-in-the-Green in the street—a man in a kind of wicker cage hung about with flowers and leaves—with Maid Marian. Friar Tuck and the rest, dancing and singing beside him. A great friend of mine, when she was a little girl of eight, was so frightened at sight of this leafy prancing creature on her way to school that she turned about and ran for a mile without stopping.
[19.]
There is far too little of Geoffrey Chaucer's—that most lovable, shrewd, compassionate, and natural of poets—in this book. There was much more of him, I noticed, in Mr. Nahum's Tome II. At first sight his words look a little strange; but not for long; and if every dotted letter is made a syllable of, his rhythm will flow like water over bright green waterweed.
It is a curious, though little thing, that while, among the one hundred and seventy varieties of flowers Shakespeare mentions, he has no less than fifty-seven several references to the rose, twenty-one to the green grass, eighteen to violets, and even to the serviceable but rank nettle a round dozen, he has but a scant five to Chaucer's beloved daisy. Flowers, it is true, as says Canon Ellacombe (who collected all such references into his delight-full book, Plant-lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare), never sweeten the Plays for their own sake alone, and there are no foxgloves, snowdrops or forget-me-nots in them at all. Still, had he loved daisies as children do, he could hardly have resisted them even for "their own sake alone." Is not bairnwort another name for the daisy?