At the end of the book are a Glossary and Indexes of subjects, authors, titles, and first lines.
TEACHERS, STORY-TELLERS, AND BALLADS
Since great care has been taken to choose authoritative texts (see Acknowledgments, page xv and Suggestions for Teachers, page 363), the teacher will find this collection helpful when instructing classes in early English literature or in ballad structure and measure.
The Glossary for classroom use is placed at the back of the book, not in footnotes, because children who are reading for enjoyment easily learn new words from the context.
The collection may be used for story-hours; or, as older boys and girls prefer being read aloud to, in it may be found an abundance of material for weekly poetry hours and for memorizing.
YOUTH IN THE BALLADS
Ballads are the natural heritage of every boy and girl. Ballads are tuned to the very pulse of Youth. They are red-blooded: joyous with the freshness of Springtime, and robust with the early Summer of Life. They appeal with peculiar delight to growing boys and girls, satisfying, as do no other poems, their craving for emotional expression in quick, rhythmic form.
Ballads not only feed the romantic spirit of young people, but teach them much homely wisdom. They are essentially democratic and human. In them Kings and tinkers, Knights and shepherds, meet, talk, and feast together like comrades.
And because the vigour of Youth so animates the old ballads, young folk read them eagerly, learn them almost without effort, and recite them with gusto. The wild, free life in the good greenwood, the chivalry, mystery, pathos, heroic deeds, and thrilling experiences—in fact, Life itself running the whole gamut of human emotions—enthrall the ever eager, questioning, shifting moods of boys and girls.