The sun sank down behind the hill, And Dimos faintly said, 'Go, children, fetch your evening meal-- The water and the bread. Thou, Lamprakis, my brother's son, Come hither, by me stand, And arm me with my weapons, And be captain of the band. And, children, take my dear old sword That I no more shall sway, And cut the green boughs from the trees And there my body lay; And hither bring a priestly man To whom I may confess, That I may tell him all my sins, And he forgive and bless. For thirty years a soldier, Twenty years a kleft was I; Now death o'ertakes and seizes me, 'Tis finished, I must die. And be ye sure ye make my grave Of ample height and large, That in it I may stand upright, Or lie my gun to charge. And to the right a lattice make, A passage for the day, Where the swallow, bringing springtide, May dart about and play, And the nightingale, sweet singer, Tell the happy month of May. The slight natural touches--the eagle soaring against the sunrise, the nightingale singing through the May nights--suggest an intuition of the will-of-the-wisp affinity between nature and human chances which seems for ever on the point of being seized, but which for ever eludes the mental grasp. We think of the "brown bird" in the noble "Funeral Song" of one who would have been a magnificent folk-poet, had he not learnt to write and read--Walt Whitman. My third specimen is a Piedmontese ballad composed probably about a hundred and fifty years ago, and still very popular. Count Nigra ascertained the existence of eight or more variants. A German soldier, known in Italy as the Baron Lodrone, took arms under the house of Savoy, in whose service he presently died. "In Turin," begins the ballad, "counts and barons and noble dames mourn for the death of the Baron Lodrone." The king went to Cuneo to visit his dying soldier; drums and cannons greeted his approach. He spoke kind words to the sick man: "Courage, thou wilt not die, and I will give thee the supreme command." "There is no commander who can stand against death," answered the baron. Now Lodrone was a Protestant, and when the king was convinced that he must die, he exhorted him to conversion, saying that he himself would stand his sponsor. Lodrone replied that that could not be. The king did not insist; he only asked him where he would be buried, and promised him a sepulchre of gold. He answered-- Mi lasserue per testament Ch 'a mi sotero an val d' Lueserna, An val d' Lueserna a m sotraran Dova l me coer s'arposa tan!