Dormi, Jesu! mater ridet
Quae tam dulcem somnam videt,
Dormi, Jesu! blandule!
Si non dormis, mater plorat,
Inter fila cantans orat,
Blande, veni, somnule.
Sleep, sweet babe! my cares beguiling:
Mother sits beside thee smiling;
Sleep, my darling, tenderly!
If thou sleep not, mother mourneth,
Singing as her wheel she turneth;
Come, soft slumber, balmily!
Original.
CELTIC ANTHOLOGY AND POETIC REMAINS.
There is no people, the annals of which may not be separated into three distinct periods, namely: the period of heroes and epico-poetic narration; the period of myth, fable, and apotheosis; and the period of realistic and definitive history. Or, to range the whole in the order of historical sequence, the three distinctive phases of race-annals may be formulated as follows:
1. The period of myth and apotheosis—which, among the European races especially, constitutes the beginning of history.
2. The period of heroes and poetic annals—which forms a kind of transition period.
3. The period of realistic definitive history, untinted with imaginative glories—the beginning of which indicates the point in race-history at which literary civilization commences.
To the analysis of the first we apply the term mythology; but for the second it happens that there is no term—unless we may be permitted so to deepen the sense of the word anthology as to include within its sweep of definition, not only poetic extracts, but poetic material and the logical analysis of that material. For the purposes of this paper, therefore, the word will be used in the sense suggested, as including the poetic material of a people, and the discussion of any anthological idiosyncrasies therein manifested.
The use of the word being permitted—it happens that, however intricate and various in details, the essential data of anthology are everywhere the same in classification, and everywhere susceptible of the same logical analysis. Without here pausing to specify reasons, which may be more conveniently specified hereafter—this division into classes of data, needful because as yet no logicalization has been here attempted, may be effected with tolerable precision by recurring to the usual analysis of a people's poetic material. The analysis of these data—anthological because imaginative and poetic—may, therefore, be exhibited thus:
1. Mythology and semi-historical or moralistic fable.
2. Poetic annals and ancient waifs of ballad and song.
3. Household legends, fairy stories, and superstitions.