The ballads neither harangue nor describe; but only state things in the least complex way. Those old singers caught language fresh and with a flavor of the soil in it still, and their hearers were people of healthy sensibilities who must be hit directly and hard. Accordingly, there is a very vigorous handling. They speak bluntly and to the purpose. If a maiden loses her lover, she merely Turns her face unto the wall And there her heart it breaks. A modern poet would have hardly thrown away the opportunity offered him for describing the chamber and its furniture; he would put a painted window into it--for the inkstand will supply them quite as cheaply as plain glass. He would tell you all about the tapestry which the eyes of the dying maiden in her extreme agony would have been likely, of course, to have been minutely interested in. He would have given a clinical lecture on the symptoms, and a post-mortem examination. It was so lucky for those old ballad-mongers that they had not any ideas! And when they give a dying speech they do not make their heroes take leave of the universe in general as if _that_ were going into mourning for a death more or less. When Earl Douglas is in his death-thraw, he says to his nephew: My wound is deep; I fain would sleep; Take thou the vanguard of the three. And hide me by the brakenbush That grows on yonder lily lee. O bury me by the brakenbush Beneath the blooming brere. Let never living mortal ken That a kindly Scot lies here. The ballads are the only true folk-songs that we have in English. There is no other poetry in the language that addresses us so simply as mere men and women. Learning has tempered with modern poetry, and the Muse, like Portia, wears a doctor’s cap and gown. The force and earnestness of style that mark the old ballad become very striking when contrasted with later attempts in the same way. It is not flatness and insipidity that they are remarkable for, but for a bare rocky grandeur in whose crevices tenderness nestles its chance tufts of ferns and harebells. One of these sincere old verses imbedded in the insipidities of a modern imitation looks out stern and colossal as that charcoal head which Michael Angelo drew on the wall of the Farnesina glowers through the paling frescoes. Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the old ballad entitled “Margaret’s Ghost,” and compared them with a few stanzas from an “improved” version of the same by Mallet. He also read from the ballad of “Helen of Kirkconnell,” and from others. Of the tenderness of the ballads I must give an instance or two before I leave them. In the old ballad of “Clerk Saunders,” Margaret follows the ghost of her lover to his grave. So painfully she climbed the wall, She climbed the wall up after him, Hose nor shoon upon her feet, She had no time to put them on.