PEOPLE AND POETS 15

I have the liveliest recollection (wrote Dr. Jakob Hurt) how on a fine
summer morning—it was a holiday—I ran to Dr. W. Schultz, then
secretary of the Esthonian Learned Academy, in real enthusiasm, and
got myself a copy of the eagerly awaited heroic poem. With hasty im-
patience I cut the pages, and with feverish excitement I ran over the
introduction and the individual songs. No other work in my youth so
gripped me, so electrified me, as these first cantos of the Kalevipoeg.
The sweet accent of my mother-tongue, beloved echoes of home, mar-
vellous memories of golden childhood, the original thoughts and figures,
the popular form and art of composition—all these worked mightily on
me, weaving a magic halo around the newly resurrected national hero.
... I understood and fully comprehended the enthusiasm of Dr. G.
Schultz of St. Petersburg when he said: 'Just think what an inspiring
influence it must be for a people to become aware and conscious of its
historical existence and grandeur! They would feel like that beggar
who was abruptly told, "You are a king's son!" Is there any more in-
contestable evidence of a people's significance than the possession of its
own epos?'1

History and interest formerly united Lithuania with Poland;
ballads and language now keep them apart. The languages of
Lithuania and Latvia are closely akin, but the countries have had
different historical experiences; the sweet elegies of Lithuania
show a different temper of mind from that which forged the
Latvian epigrams.

Ballads have power to declare nationality and separate neigh-
bours, but they have also power to unite those whom history has
put asunder. The old common feelings of Scotland, Norway, and
Denmark, revealed in the ballads, have been to some extent re-
covered in modern times by Jamieson's rendering of the Viser',2
and Grundtvig's of the Scottish pieces. The scores of English
ballads alive in the American mountains, sung in the manner of
English folk-songs and occasionally in modes we have forgotten,
are firm testimony to the cousinship of the two nations. The
greatest services to English literature by the United States have
been F. J. Child's ordering of the English and Scottish Ballads, and
the discovery by his pupils how lively these traditions of ours are
to-day in America.

1 J. Hurt, Vana Kannel (Alte Harfe), Tartu, 1886, i, pp. xi-xii.

2 Selected 'viser*. A more amply representative collection is R. C. A. Prior's
Ancient Danish Ballads, 3 vols., London, 1860.