Folk-song in the primitive stage always had a refrain or chorus. The invocation of spring, met in so many songs of later time, is doubtless a survival of an older communal chorus sung to deities of summer and flooding sunshine and fertility. The well-known Latin 'Pervigilium Veneris,' artistic and elaborate as it is in eulogy of spring and love, owes its refrain and the cadence of its trochaic rhythm to some song of the Roman folk in festival; so that Walter Pater is not far from the truth when he gracefully assumes that the whole poem was suggested by this refrain "caught from the lips of the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa," during that Indian summer of paganism under the Antonines. This haunting refrain, with its throb of the spring and the festal throng, is ruthlessly tortured into a heroic couplet in Parnell's translation:-- Let those love now who never loved before; Let those who always loved now love the more! Contrast the original!-- _Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet!_ This is the trochaic rhythm dear to the common people of Rome and the near provinces, who as every one knows spoke a very different speech from the speech of the patrician, and sang their own songs withal; a few specimens of the latter, notably the soldiers' song about Caesar, have come down to us.[11] [11] We cannot widen our borders so as to include that solitary folk-song rescued from ancient Greek literature, the 'Song of the Swallow,' sung by children of the Island of Rhodes as they went about asking gifts from house to house at the coming of the earliest swallow. The metre is interesting in comparison with the rhythm of later European folk-songs, and there is evident dramatic action. Nor can we include the fragments of communal drama found in the favorite Debates Between Summer and Winter,--from the actual contest, to such lyrical forms as the song at the end of Shakespeare's 'Love's Labor's Lost.' The reader may be reminded of a good specimen of this class in 'Ivy and Holly,' printed by Ritson, 'Ancient Songs and Ballads,' Hazlitt's edition, page 114 ff., with the refrain:-- Nay, Ivy, nay, Hyt shal not be, I wys; Let Holy hafe the maystry, As the maner ys.