Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any useless information. They had not wit enough to lose their way. It is only the greatest brains and the most intense imagination that can fuse learning into one substance with their own thought and feeling, and so interpenetrate it with _themselves_ that the acquired is as much _they_ as the native. The ballad-makers had not far to seek for material. The shipwreck, the runaway match, the unhappy marriage, the village ghost, the achievement of the border outlaw--in short, what we read every day under the head of _Items_ in the newspapers, were the inspiration of their song. And they sang well, because they thought, and felt, and believed just as their hearers did, and because they never thought anything about it. The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so; and they are models of nervous and simple diction because the business of the poet was to _tell_ his story, and not to adorn it; and accordingly he went earnestly and straightforwardly to work, and let the rapid thought snatch the word as it ran, feeling quite sure of its getting the right one. The only art of expression is to have something to express. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an electrical machine, which a sufficiently muscular professor can grind out by the dozen, and the wildfire of God that writes _mene, mene_, on the crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud. It seems to me that the ballad-maker, in respect of diction, had also this advantage--that he had no books. Language, when it speaks to the eye only, loses half its meaning. For the eye is an outpost of the brain, and wears its livery oftener than that of the character. But the temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions, _these_ utter themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that the true mother-tongue that knows the short way to the heart is learned. I do not believe that a man born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or sound anything but the edges and shores of Lear’s tempestuous woe. I think that the great masters of speech have hunted men and not libraries, and have found the secret of their power in the street and not upon the shelf. It is the _way_ of saying things that is learned by commerce with men, and the best writers have mixed much with the world. It is there only that the language of feeling can be acquired. The ballads are models of narrative poetry. They are not concerned with the utterance of thought, but only of sentiment or passion, and it is as illustrating poetic diction that I shall chiefly cite them. If they moralize it is always by picture, and not by preachment. What discourse of inconstancy has the force and biting pathos of this grim old song, the “Twa Corbies”?