'And scarce from out the mead-glass bright the first draught does she take,
(The hour goes heavy by,)
Her eyes were sudden closed, and her weary heart it brake,
(Ah! well sorrow's burden know I.)'
That the Greeks had similar ballads and legends can not be doubted, but to revive them from their present destruction is a task beyond the power of science and antiquarianism. Hardly more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the first important steps were taken in the North of Europe to preserve these ballads which had thus been orally handed down from ages that vanish in the darkness of the past, and which in a few years more, with the gradual disappearance of primitive simplicity in Sweden and Norway, might have been, for the greater part, lost to us forever. Who knows but that in some remote corner of Greece, in spite of the revolutions and shocks which have convulsed it, there may still lurk an occasional shadow at least of some good old popular song?
The refrains which accompany the Northern ballads, and which are, in fact, found among all nations whose ballad poetry has been preserved, merit some attention. Sometimes melancholy and sad, sometimes gay and joyous, they impart character wonderfully to the piece. There is something peculiarly mournful in the recurring of these sad, touching thoughts and words, and as the interest of the ballad deepens, their touching simplicity grasps more deeply into the soul, and affects us in a manner which nothing else could. When they are joyous—a rarer form, however—they impart to us also their own buoyancy and gayety. Sometimes they convey the moral of the piece, some simple yet profound reflection, which marks by itself the feeling that pervades the whole ballad; at other times they are merely descriptive of nature, and borrow their enlivening or heart-rending character from the assimilation or contrast they present with the groundwork of the poetry. The origin of this kind of refrain is evidently due to the manner in which the ballads were composed. Mainly extemporized, both words and music, by wandering scalds or minstrels, the refrain was a pause to enable the singer to compose the next line. The utter disregard of rhyme, alliterations the most slight and imperceptible, and words of no similarity of sound almost always taking their place, rendered this a very easy task. A thorough knowledge and mastery of legendary lore, and a little power and concentration of thought and imagery, were the only qualities requisite for a ballad-monger. Some of them bear the marks of superior minds, both by their wonderful vividness of description and by the tone of deep, genuine feeling which pervades them throughout.
There is a wonderful affinity between the Scotch and the Norwegians and Swedes, especially in their traditionary literature, which marks a common origin and common customs at some remote period. We find among the genuine Scotch ballads many that are almost literal versions of the same Scandinavian legends no less indigenous in their own land. A large number of the most beautiful Scotch ballads plainly point to an extraneous Northern origin, and their exact counterparts in form, ideas, and words, we find circulating as popular songs among the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian peasantry. These may often be traced back centuries, at the end of which they seem still to be as old and as thoroughly implanted in their native soil as they now seem. They have been sung from mouth to mouth, with the same wild old melodies and the same quaint language, as they were sung centuries ago among the scenes they so faithfully depict.
The characteristics we have so briefly alluded to as marking the two classes of nations, namely, mysterious grandeur among the Northmen, and among the Greeks ideality, grandness, and vividness of conception, might by skillful hands be traced in more modern times under the influence of an ever-changing and growing civilization. I will only allude, in passing, to a few prominent points.
The literature of Greece, as we know it, had already reached its hight, two thousand years before our time. It was already gray with years before the North had begun its infancy. Homer is the boundary which is insurmountably opposed to our further retrospection, and Homer is already the beginning of perfection in Greek letters. Of earlier periods we can but conjecture that there must have been such, bearing a character analogous to the relics of those nations whose fabulous history is better known to us. Northern literature can hardly be said to have had an existence till within the last hundred years. Before that time we must look for all phases of progress and germs of progress in the physical and animal character of the nation, their social and political features and relations. The vividness and ideality of the ancients find their natural change in the more purely impassioned style of more modern Southern poetry. Their creations have naturally lost with the fall of paganism, the supernatural endowments they had, and retaining in some their ideality, they have hightened and fired the human nature they depict by the addition of wilder and more flaming passions, of love that consumes, and ambition, revenge, and hatred that destroy. Thus we again obtain consistent characters governed by human laws, but raised above the ordinary mass of men by different qualities from those which ennobled ideal creations among the ancients. Repose still constitutes greatness in some instances; but the inner man is made all fire, and seething metal, ever-burning and quenchless. Elevation and subtlety of ideas naturally follow these causes, they are another natural growth of the simple ideality of conception.
The Northern character at the present day has very different qualities. Though renowned for philosophical and metaphysical prose, yet their poetry they require to deal with realities and not with ideas; it must be clear as a fountain, and any opaqueness is an inexcusable flaw. They are yet in the infancy of literature, and the imagination is still more sensuous than acute and subtle. However much they court abstractions in prose, in verse they love only the actual, the real, the tangible. Nature, and not metaphysics, are the subjects of their poetry, and they still preserve a freshness and simplicity reminding of more ancient and ruder days, delightful amidst the hair-splitting of most modern poetry. Their infancy is like the infancy of all national literatures, peculiarly modified by the advanced state of civilization in which their birth was thrown. At first sight there seems something unnatural and unaccountable in this apparent contradiction in the character of the nation, manifested respectively in their prose and their poetry. But on farther examination all becomes clear as a spring day. Their prose was, as their whole literature might and should have been, contemporary with their civilization through its various phases. Metaphysics is the last refinement, or rather, corruption, which national literature undergoes. Their prose had naturally arrived at this stage when the true poetic feeling woke for the first time. And in spite of the rational tendencies of the age, it assumed that character of warm, bodily imagination which marks all early literatures. The tendency to the mysterious and the superhuman has mostly vanished, and more vivid conceptions of every thing have, under their Christian development, taken the place of dim magic and weird creations. Northern poets still delight in dealing with those wonderful poetical inventions of their own ancient mythology, and revel among the elves and dwarfs that surround the bosoms of mountains and woods. Lif, with her golden hair, Gerda, with cheeks like auroras, the cunning Loke, with his mixture of guile, wickedness and deceit, Thor's mighty Mjölner, and the mead-horns of Walhalla—from among these wonderful beings, they have culled with a careless hand, and every sprig and flower is radiant with poetic beauty. The taste for old legends and traditions has revived within a few years, and scholars and antiquarians are now laying open unknown mines of treasure.
A TRUE ROMANCE.
Among my friends at Rome, during a few weeks that I spent there, was one old resident of the 'Eternal City' whom I had often begged to give me some authentic narrative of Catholic experience. He was naturally reserved, jealously truthful, a 'know-nothing' upon religious controversy, not at all the man to invent an exciting story, not fond of legends, Romish or Genevan, not a violent partisan of republicanism in church or state, and not familiar enough with American thought to suspect the use that might be made in the United States of such an incident as I am now to repeat. In fact, as I compare him with other sources of intelligence open to travelers, sure as I am that no one could question his belief of whatever he told, every weight that character, intelligence, years, experience, could confer, rests upon the only monkish secret which he professed to know. One night he invited me to a subterranean restaurant, famous for its excellent creature-comforts, and there over some royal English beer, without any graces of style or attempts to exaggerate the incidents, he unfolded what I believe to be a true record of unblessed love.