Before we attempt to carry our reader more deeply into this subject, we must ask him to divest himself as much as possible of his personal and national feelings, views, and prejudices, and to suffer himself to be transported into a world foreign to his habitual course of ideas. Human feelings, it is true, are the same every where; but we have more of the artificial and factitious in us than we are aware of. And in many cases, we hold, that it is not the worst part of us; for we are far from belonging to the class of advocates of mere nature. The reader, for instance, must not expect to find in all the immense treasure of Slavic love-songs, adapted to a variety of situations, a single trace of _romance_, that beautiful blossom of Christianity among the Teutonic races. The love expressed in the Slavic songs is the natural, heartfelt, overpowering sensation of the human breast, in all its different shades of tender affection and glowing sensuality; never elevating but always natural, always unsophisticated, and much deeper, much purer in the female heart, than in that of man. In their heroic songs, also, the reader must not expect to meet with the chivalry of the more western nations. Weak vestiges of this kind of exaltation, with a few exceptions, are to be found among those Slavic nations only, who, by frequent intercourse with other races, adopted in part their feelings. The gigantic heroism of the Slavic Woiwodes and Boyars is not the bravery of honour; it is the valour of manly strength, the valour of the heroes of Homer. The Servian hero, Marko Kralyewitch, was regarded by Goethe as the personification of _absolute_ heroism; but even Marko does not think it beneath him to flee, when he meets one stronger than himself. These are the dictates of nature, which only an artificial point of honour can overcome.