|It gives one a strange idea of what treasures of primitive poetry and music may yet be found among the peasantry of Europe, when a volume like this--The Bard of the Dimbovitza, Roumanian Folk-Songs. Collected from the Peasants by Helene Yacaresco. Translated by Carmen Sylva and Alma Strettell--has been brought to light from the single district of Roumania. The preface by Carmen Sylva (the Queen of Roumania), herself an accomplished literary artist, says that these songs were collected from the lips of peasant girls, the lute players, the reapers, and the gypsies, by the young poetess Helene Yacaresco, in the district of Roumania, in which her father's domain is situated. She spent four years in collecting them, and even although her family has been known and honored for centuries by the people, she encountered many difficulties in endeavoring to induce the peasants to repeat their songs to her. "She was forced to affect a desire to learn spinning that she might join the girls at their spinning parties, and so overhear their songs more easily; she hid in the tall maize to hear the reapers crooning; she caught them from the lips of peasant women, of lute players Cobzars,' so called from the name of their instrument, the cobza, or lute, of gypsies, of fortune tellers; she listened for them by death-beds, by cradles, at the dance, and in the tavern with inexhaustible patience." The result is a volume which is not only equal in quality to that of the finest folk-song and poetry which any European nation possesses, and with a peculiar and original flavor of its own, revealing strong and original national characteristics, but, one is tempted to say, with more of the sublimated and naked essence of poetry than can be found in any work of modern civilized poets. There are times when the vivid strength of simple passions, expressed with the force of naked directness without any weakening refinement of language, the feelings of a people to whom love is a genuine and undisguised passion, in whom hatred burns the blood and finds relief in the shot or the stab, to whom death is an object of vital horror as the end of life and happiness, and to whom religion is an embodiment of direct supernatural power, produce a poetry, which reaches a force of expression and touches the heart with a power to which all modern refinements of thought and language are unable to attain. It is, in comparison, as if a cloud of unreality, the emanations of artificial thoughts and sentiments, or the dust, as it were, of ages, had fallen upon the native freshness of feeling and language, and that civilized men were no longer able to feel so deeply or to speak so clearly as those who had never been burdened with knowledge, or the strength of whose emotions had not been diluted by the restraints and refinements of civilization, transcendental religion, or artificial society. There is, of course, a power and subtlety of thought