i8o	ROMANCE BALLADS
On his wrist a hooded falcon,
was the Count a-hunting gone,
when he saw a stately galley
just about to reach the shore.
Silken all the sails she carried,
and of sendal rope and thong,
and a sailor who was steering
chanted, as he sailed, a song:
song that hushed the sea to stillness,
quieted the wild winds down;
fish in the abysses swimming
it beguiled to swim above,
birds in heights of air a-flying
charmed to rest his mast upon.
Then outspake the Count Arnaldos,
you shall hear his word anon:
'In the name of God, good sailor,
teach me, teach rne, this your song.'
Answered thus to him the sailor,
thus to him has answer done:
'No man teach I what I'm singing,
save he sail with me along.'1
The charm of Count Arnaldos is produced entirely by a most
fortunate forgetfulness. The end of the story is a commonplace
matter; the sailor is a pirate and seizes the Count, but then recog-
nizes in him his long-lost lord, and all ends happily. The cut,
applied in the Cancionero de Amberes, has added just that salt of
lyrical emotion which is needed to make the perfect ballad; for
though we have defined ballads as narratives, yet such narratives
only reach exquisiteness when they have this lyrical touch. It is
in Mudarra's Vengeance and Blancanina, in Count Olinos and The
Prisoner; and in each case it comes from the same refining process,
which has cleared away prosaic detail, and left us an emotion in
purest poignancy. The same touch is found in Rosa fresca and
Fonte frida (115, 116), which would doubtless have been at one
time banal histories of adultery. The latter must have existed early
in the fifteenth century, for its wording influenced Jaume de
Olesa's copy of the Gentle Lady, which must be dated about 1421.
Fonte frida might be rendered thus:
Cooling fountain, cooling fountain,
cooling fountain, fount of love,
1 See Note F.