It was now several centuries since the song had first come into existence. Since that time it had undergone perhaps a dozen transformations, each so unlike the other that nobody would have suspected they had any relation. But they were different forms of one and the same song. For songs have ancestors and descendants just as men do. Our song may have had a numerous progeny. As it passed from one province to another certain phrases of the melody lingered in people’s minds and found their way into other songs. Perhaps a line or two of its words became common property and were used as the refrain for a new song. Certainly as people made other songs they perforce made them somewhat in the image of the great ancestor. Thus for centuries--ten, twenty, or thirty, likely as not--the song was growing and changing, or at least giving birth to children before dying by the wayside. And folk-songs are still alive, growing and changing. It seems possible that the years of their natural life may be numbered, for it is becoming harder every year for them to live in their new environment. But they are still in the land of the living and may continue for centuries to come, and if so they are bound to continue to grow and change. Thirty centuries of growth have not taken place that songs may stop growing right here. Perhaps the songs of to-day may seem as crude to people five hundred years hence as the songs of five hundred years ago seem to us now. V We must always remember that songs of every kind are primarily composed in the spirit of this typical folk-song. Even the most learned composer is spiritually a descendant of the crazy Roumanian peasant woman, and his songs, if they are real songs at all, are of the same spontaneous kind as hers. However much he may be occupied with conscious scholastic principles, if his music does not somehow sing in this natural, artless vein it is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The impulse to song is the soul of all true songs the world over. What this impulse is has occupied the minds of theorists for many a year. Their explanations are perhaps not important, since whatever their conclusions we still posses the wonderful song literature which is at our disposal. But their theories are at least interesting, if only to prove that song, like love, is one of those human things that can never be utterly explained.