that man was Coleridge and that poem his Ancient Mariner. If any poet now alive can be called a ballad-writer of genius, it is the author of Danny Deever and East and West. But let the reader suppose a fascicule of such poems bound up with the present collection, and he will perceive that I could have gone no straighter way to destroy the singularity of the book.
In claiming this singularity for the Ballad I do not seek to exalt it above any other lyrical form. Rather I am ready to admit, out of some experience in anthologizing, that when a ballad is set in a collection alongside the best of Herrick, Gray, Landor, Browning—to name four poets opposite as the poles and to say nothing of such masterwork as Spenser’s Epithalamion or Milton’s Lycidas—it is the ballad that not only suffers by the apposition but suffers to a surprising degree; so that I have sometimes been forced to reconsider my affection, and ask ‘Are these ballads really beautiful as they have always appeared to me?’ In truth (as I take it) the contrast is unfair to them, much as any contrast between children and grown folk would be unfair. They appealed to something young in the national mind, and the young still ramp through Percy’s Reliques—as I hope they will through this book—‘trailing clouds of glory,’ following the note in Elmond’s wood—
May Margaret sits in her bower door
Sewing her silken seam;
She heard a note in Elmond’s wood,
And wish’d she there had been.
She loot the seam fa’ frae her side,
The needle to her tae,
And she is on to Elmond’s wood
As fast as she could gae.
A. Q. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A smaller edition of ‘Child’, excellently planned, by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittridge, is published in England by Mr. Nutt.
[2] 1864.
[3] This does not hold of small transpositions, elisions of superfluous words, or corrections of spelling. In these matters I have allowed myself a free hand.
[4] On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500, by W. P. Ker, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. iv.