[Footnote 6: "Les deux Masques," tome i. p. 1.] [Footnote 7: "Confessions," book iii. chap. 11.] [Footnote 8: "Shakespeare's Dramatic Art," 1876.] THE INSPIRATION OF DEATH IN FOLK-POETRY. The Roumanians call death "the betrothed of the world:" that which awaits. The Neapolitans give it the name of _la vedova_: that which survives. It would be easy to go on multiplying the stock of contrasting epithets. Inevitable yet a surprise, of daily incidence yet a mystery, unvarying yet most various, a common fact yet incapable of becoming common-place, death may be looked at from innumerable points of view; but, look at it how we will, it moves and excites our spiritual consciousness as nothing else can do. The first poet of human things was perhaps one who stood in the presence of death. In the twilight that went before civilization the loves of men were prosaic, and intellectual unrest was remote, but there was already Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not. Death, high priest of the ideal, led man in his infancy through a crisis of awe passing into transcendent exaltation, kindred with the state which De Quincey describes when recalling the feelings wrought in his childish brain by the loss of his sister. It set the child-man asking why? first sign of a dawning intelligence; it told him in familiar language that we lie on the borders of the unknown; it opened before him the infinite spaces of hope and fear; it shattered to pieces the dull round of the food-seeking present, and built up out of the ruins the perception of a past and a future. It was the symbol of a human oneness with the coming and going of day and night, summer and winter, the rising and receding tide. It caused even the rudest of men to speak lower, to tread more softly, revealing to him unawares the angel Reverence. And above all, it wounded the heart of man. M. Renan says with great truth, "Le grand agent de la marche du monde, c'est la douleur." What poetry owes to the bread of sorrow has never been better told than by the Greek folk-singer, who condenses it into one brief sentence: "Songs are the words spoken by those who suffer."