i24 THE ASCENT OF BALLADS

natural dread. Lenore like wildfire swept across Europe, from
Scotland to Poland and Russia, from Scandinavia to Italy'.1
Biirger devoted himself to the ballad, and drew from his studies
far-reaching conclusions. He found in folk-poetry an overflowing
of the heart ('Kerzensausguss'), needed to redeem German verse
from its false erudition. The supreme panacea was contact with
nature and the folk; poetry is a gift the poet offers to all men, not
merely to an elite. Folk-songs are the essence of poetry, and the
more elevated lyrics are justified only when they are Volkstlimlich'.
He insisted on the importance of fantasy and invention, and
demanded a German collection to be placed on the same shelf as
Percy.

The German collection was already in the making, since Goethe,
with Herder's encouragement, wras busy in Alsace collecting songs
and gaining for himself the gift of song. It is because of its charac-
teristic freshness and even naivety that the German lyric transcends
other forms of German literature, and in Goethe, even when most
artful, there is a living fountain of spontaneous song. Meanwhile
Herder was compiling his Volkslieder, issued in 1778-9, and later
entitled Stimmen der Volker in Liedern. The bulk of the book con-
sists of translations from Percy, including some Shakespearian
songs, together with Spanish 'romances' of the Morisco type
(under Percy's influence) and seven lyrics from Gongora. The
German songs of his fifth book are not authentically traditional,
but rather showed what might be done in this field with a closer
study. The Scandinavian North is represented by Scaldic and
Eddie verse, with four Danish 'viser', and there was enough to call
attention to the Lithuanian 'dainos' and the 'Morlakian' songs of
the Serbs. Seventy ballads on the Cid (Der Cid nach spanischen
Romanzen, 1805) completed the range of examples on which
Herder based his impassioned appeal for a new German poetry.
Herder internationalized Percy. The appeal for German verse was
splendidly answered by Goethe's Erlkonig (based on the Danish
Elveskud, which is also the source of Leconte de Lisle's Les Elfes)
and his Konig in Thule. The perfect phrasing of these pieces would
not outlive traditional variations, but in every other respect they
are ballads: in speed and felicity, abrupt dramatism, and the magic
of words unspoken. The honest Schiller was less happy. He aimed
at a more elaborate style, in which short narratives taken from
1 J. G. Robertson, History of German Literature, London, 1931, p, 308.