Shee's as soft as any silk,
And as white as any milk.
"Ballad of Kinge Adler," in the Percy MS.
Instead of "Water, water, wild-flowers," as printed on the next page, we find in Philadelphia, "Lily, lily, white-flower," which may have been the original, and reminds us of the refrains of certain ballads. In Yorkshire, England, "Willy, willy, wall-flower."
A specimen of the quintessence of absurdity is the following street-song:
Swallow, swallow, weeping
About a willow tree,
All the boys in Fiftieth Street
Are dying down below;
Excepting —— ——
His love he can't deny,
For he loves —— ——
And she loves him beside, etc.
Notwithstanding the vulgarity of these stanzas, and of others which are employed for the same purpose, the practice which they illustrate—namely, the adaptation of a ballad to the dance by uniting with it a game-rhyme—is no doubt ancient. We have other examples in the numbers which follow.
[54] "Lines told to Lydia Jackson (now Mrs. R. W. Emerson, of Concord, Mass.) by her aunt, Joanna Cotton, in 1806-7-8, in Plymouth."
[55] Observe how the nursery song differs from the children's dance. The nurse wishes to persuade the little child in her lap that paring nails is a mark of great regard and affection, as, while performing that office, she chants the ballad to amuse her charge.
[56] "It is on a summer's tide, when ladies' hearts are free and gay, when they go arrayed in ermine and silk. The hart strikes his horn against the linden, and the fish leaps in the stream."—Icelandic Ballad.
[57] Some little friends, feeling the unsatisfactoriness of the fragment, added a couplet to the dance—