But here, a lovely girl leaves her blind father to search for fortune. She has many adventures, and in the end, she marries a knight. The ballad ends with words of almost childish simplicity, but they are words which ring with the true tone of happiness:-- Thus was the feast ended with joye and delighte A bridegroome most happy then was the young knighte In joy and felicitie long lived hee All with his faire ladye, the pretty Bessee. I said that the words were of almost childish simplicity. But the student of language, and the would-be writer, might do worse than study those words, if only to see how the cumulative effect of brightness and radiance is gained. You may think the words are artless, but just ponder, for a moment, the number of brilliant verbal symbols which are collected into that tiny verse. There are only four lines. But those lines contain these words ... Feast, joy, delight, bridegroom, happy, joy, young, felicity, fair, pretty. Is that quite so artless, after all? Is it not rather like an old and primitive plaque, where colour is piled on colour till you would say the very wood will burst into flame ... and yet, the total effect is one of happy simplicity? V How were the early ballads born? Who made them? One man or many? Were they written down, when they were still young, or was it only after the lapse of many generations, when their rhymes had been sharpened and their metres polished by constant repetition, that they were finally copied out? To answer these questions would be one of the most fascinating tasks which the detective in letters could set himself. Grimm, listening in his fairyland, heard some of the earliest ballads, loved them, pondered on them, and suddenly startled the world by announcing that most ballads were not the work of a single author, but of the people at large. _Das Volk dichtet_, he said. And that phrase got him into a lot of trouble. People told him to get back to his fairyland and not make such ridiculous suggestions. For how, they asked, could a whole people make a poem? You might as well tell a thousand men to make a tune, limiting each of them to one note! To invest Grimm's words with such an intention is quite unfair. [Footnote: For a discussion of Grimm's theories, together with much interesting speculation on the origin of the ballads, the reader should study the admirable introduction to _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, published by George Harrap & Co., Ltd.] Obviously a multitude of people could not, deliberately, make a single poem any more than a multitude of people could, deliberately, make a single picture, one man doing the nose, one man an eye and so on. Such a suggestion is grotesque, and Grimm never meant it. If I might guess at what he meant, I would suggest that he was thinking that the origin of ballads must have been similar to the origin of the dance, (which was probably the earliest form of aesthetic expression known to man).