Ulrichs; in Provence, Damase Arbaud; in Italy, M. Nigra; in Servia, Talvj; in France, Gérard de Nerval--have done for their separate countries what Scott did for the Border. Professor Child, of Harvard, is publishing a beautiful critical collection of English _Volkslieder_, with all known variants from every country. A comparison of the collections proves that among all European lands the primitive 'versicles' of the people are identical in tone, form, and incident. It is this kind of early expression of a people's life--careless, abrupt, brief, as was necessitated by the fact that they were sung to the accompaniment of the dance--that we call ballads. These are distinctly, and in every sense, popular poems, and nothing can cause greater confusion than to apply the same title, 'popular,' to early epic poetry. Ballads are short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher _laisse_ of the French _chansons de geste_, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, _whose descendants are still in the land_, whose home is a recognisable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of early poetry--the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of the chiefs of the people, of the ruling race--are distinct in kind, it does not follow that they have no connection, that the nobler may not have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of expression. And the value of the 'Kalevala' is partly this, that it combines the continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and popularity of the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history of the development of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to explain the literary history of the Finnish national poem.