60 KINDS AND DATES

with St. Stephen in England and the Pilgrim to Compostela in

Spain, but the two ballads are not akin.

In more didactic or lyrical styles the religious class stretches out
to cover small dramas; death, resurrection, and the judgement;
prayers, praise, thanks, consolation, confession, legacies; and the
complete calendar of church festivals. This fullness of material is
especially noticeable in Balkan balladry.

To the remaining ballads the word adventurous may be applied.
They relate some event which is interesting; which is an adventure.
Any more precise term would not cover the miscellaneous con-
tents of this class, which receives those not otherwise placed. It is
not homogeneous. One group, most ample in Lithuania and
Latvia, is the mythological and superhuman. The gods, Sun and
Moon, appear as actors; or there are superhuman characters drawn
from the fairy world of decadent paganism. Earth spirits—elves,
dwarfs, kobolds—water spirits—nixes, mermen, swans—Vile' and
nereids, dragons and snakes, changelings and bewitched persons,
re\|nants5 death and Charon, the Venusberg and the Earthly
Paradise, are themes of ballads reverend for their age or moving for
their mysterious force. Then there are innumerable love ballads:
encounters, happy love, opposition overcome, sorrow and separa-
tion, tragedy, prevention of bigamy or incest, reunion, adultery,
murder for love, incest, rape, faithfulness in trial, the sad case of
the nun, bride-stealing, death. It is always a material consideration
in ballad poetry whether a crime be a 'crime passioneP. There are
ballads on the crimes which seem popularly most abhorrent:
cruelty by step-parents or mothers-in-law, poisoning, murder of
husband or wife, parenticide, and infanticide, the worst of all.
These pieces may be reports of real crimes or plebeian ballads of
morbid tendency. The number of ballads dealing with prisoners,
their misfortunes and escapes, are a searing comment on human
kindness: we find the innocent in prison, who is executed or
escapes, or languishes with only a bird for consolation; the prisoner
who escapes by the aid of the jailer's daughter, sometimes marry-
ing her, sometimes deserting; the ruses of devoted wives and their
self-sacrifice; rescue by force or by counterfeiting death. If we
do not open a section of ballad novelettes under the literary heading,
we shall have to record here such highly developed adventures as
those of Tannhauser, the noble Moringer, Bluebeard, Henry the
Lion, the Count in the plough, Wilhelm Tell, the girl who went to