264 NORDIC BALLADS

quatrains that live to-day in Switzerland, Alsace, Carinthia, and the
Tyrol. In such pieces we have the originals of Heidenwslein and so
many other of Germany's best artistic lyrics; we find also the secret
of Goethe and Heine's music. A naive felicity breathes in such
lines as (being translated):

Shine on us, lovely sunshine,

give us your brightest ray,
shine on two loves together

who fain would meet to-day.

The songs of parting lovers are full of such felicities; desertion
and death fill folk-poetry with an emotion both tender and
deep.

I heard a sickle rustling,

a-rustling through the corn,
I heard a maiden crying,
of her true love forlorn.

' So let it rustle, leveling,

I care not how it go:
new mistress here I've won me

in this green sod below.'

(Hast thou a mistress won thee

in that green sod below,
then stand I here so lonely,

my heart is full of woe.'

This tenderness, sometimes degenerating into sentimentality, is
universal in these expressions of the joy of true love, of longing,
of wooing and winning, of opposition, separation, loss, and the
ecstasy of reunion. The German minstrel sees these chapters in the
immemorial romance simply. He has none of the austerity which
breaks through in Spanish ballads; still less has he the light cyni-
cism of the French. The French, unfortunately for their poetry,
have not chosen to give due representation in their verses to the
claims of simple emotion. The popular singers of the Middle Ages
inherited a tradition from the troubadours, which turned love into
an intrigue irrelevant to marriage. The result is a great deal of
amusing and witty verse; one touches delicately, carelessly, upon
illicit love, furtive meetings, ludicrous contretemps, and the
cuckolding of husbands. There is a good deal of this in the corpus
of German ballads also, and it is easy to recognize the foreign