284 NORDIC BALLADS

Even in borrowed poems there is room for a certain originality.
The Polish ballad of Leander contains no more than the final scene
of Two King's Children, and shows the withdrawal of Leander's
body from the waves. It is the most poignant moment of the
pathetic history, and well suited to treatment as a song. Another
ballad may be based on Elveskud (Walter, p. 15) or on another
cycle. It begins:

There rides a rider with steel bedight,

he rideth home from the awful fight.

His family receive him, as in the Danish ballad, and put him to
bed; but then the story takes a new turn. He learns that his mother
has died, and he dies of grief:

*To thee, dear Son, what can I give,

I that so long have ceased to live.

Take a small room so dim and lone

'twixt worm and root and the grey, grey stone.'

'Oh heaven, oh earth, oh heavenly grace !
Oh dearest mother in grisly place !'

The rider rides with death and night,
comes no more home from the awful fight.

The rendering of The Castle in Austria (Walter, p. 11) has a similar
light touch. In Sir Sawa (Zaleski BB 23) we find an effective
history of what may have been an actual event. Sir Sawa returned
home to find that his wife had given him a son; but no sooner had
he descended to the cellar for wine to celebrate the event, than
Cossacks attacked him and killed him unarmed. The tragic
emotions are here, as elsewhere, those affected by the ballad-
poets, as in the more vulgar Lord Kaniowski, Jasia, and Nastyna
(Zaleski BB 13, 14, 2, i).

7. Lithuania, Latvia

One might say that the colour of Lithuanian f dainos' is a trans-
lucent green. It is not merely that the colour is so often mentioned
in the poems. It is rather that the language and manner have the
qualities of early Spring; that there is something strangely delicate,
pellucid, and yet vivacious in the songs of the Lithuanian peasants.
They are songs rather than ballads. The predominance of the lyric
which is notable in later German work, and augmented in Poland,
1 See Note L, p. 389.