SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 181

Thither little birds are winging,
ail there consolation know,
save that drooping in her sorrow
broods the widowed turtle-dove.
Thither hasteneth a traitor,
comes the nightingale along:
and he fashioneth his discourse,
and of treason is each word:

'Wert thou gracious to me, lady,
I would be thy servant now/

'Out away, thou art a traitor,
false, sly, tricky didst thou prove.
Never more I on green bough settle,
nor in meadow make my bower.
Turbid is the fountain's water,
that, when found, did limpid show.
Never may I marry husband,
never children bear of love:
pleasure comes no more from children,
nor does consolation come.
Out away, thou sorry traitor,
false, sly, tricky dost thou prove,
never will I be thy lady,
never be thy married love.'

The full story, did we know it, might be that of the Lady of Weissen-
berg reversed. Nuno Vero (168) is another of the same kind. It uses
the motif of a false report of a husband's death. Some of its words
have crept into the Tristan ballad, thus attesting its own early date.
The power of love is a motif of all balladry, and it is the principal
moral left by the romantic portion of the 'romancero':

that the faults that lovers make
worthily forgiveness gain.

It is the indulgent moral of the classical 'coniedia', which uses love
as the universal motive. The notion of the lover who alone pays
ransom is not known in Spain; but the triumph of love over death,
exemplified by the springing of trees and flowers as in the French
Thorn and Olive, is a feature of Tristan and Count Olinos. As for
the power of beauty, it finds expression in an admirable fragment,
St. Simon's Hermitage (143). A fuller version is current in Cata-
lonia under the title of The Lady of Aragon. It was probably
borrowed by the Catalans, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks