LITHUANIA, LATVIA 285

becomes absolute in crossing this further linguistic frontier. All
Lithuanian work is lyrical. There remain, however, certain
narrative suggestions, of a faint and elusive quality. The situation
on which the emotion is founded is outlined in one or two strokes,
like those of a Chinese painter of birds in flight. One learns some-
thing about place and circumstance, as one does also in the £cos-
santes' of Portugal. The emotional appeal is heightened by repeti-
tion. As in old Portugal and Galicia, so in Lithuania, the subtlest
suggestions are made by means of parallel phrases and tableaux;
but there is greater variety in the types of Lithuanian parallelism.
These 'chinos' are so often exquisite, so normally happy, that they
must be held to be the most perfect type of those ballads which
have been described earlier as narrative lyrics, They lie at one
extreme end of the ballad spectrum.

Lines are of various length, and without rhyme or assonance in
principle. In practice it is hardly possible to avoid assonance,
thanks to the incessant use of beautiful liquid diminutives, and to
identical flexions in the verbs. Alliteration, also, is not a prosodic
principle, but a constant occurrence. We have not to suppose that
the singers are unaware of these features of their songs, but that, on
the contrary, one of the principal sources of their pleasure is the
gossamer of elusive echoes which floats about their poems. Lines
are, however, grouped into stanzas of simple, but precise, struc-
ture. It is the function of the melodies to group the lines, but they
cohere also in sense. The parallel construction of phrases and
distribution of line-lengths produce stanzas which are readily
recognized as such even in print. In short, this is a quality held
in common with the whole Xordic group, and the absence of dance-
refrains is a specific feature of the German sub-area. We have seen
that the intermittent assonance of German balladry shows signs
of failing altogether in Poland; Lithuania's cdainos" are but one
remove farther on the same road.

The music scans the lines. The ordinary prose accents of words
are not obligatory in verse, and the latter can be 'read by the
melody' (ant balso skaityti),1 with an arbitrarily regularized

1 Nesselmann quotes as an example:

Normal Melodic Translation

Ant tiltuiio stowejau, Ant tiltusio stoycejdu, I stood on a bridge,
su mergyte kalbejau su mergfte kalbejdu I spoke to a maid

The grave and acute accents represent minor and major stresses. (The dots over
certain vowels and consonants are orthographic.)