It may look like taking a liberty with the chart of ballad poetry to label as 'romantic' a single province of this kingdom of Old Romance. It is probably not even the most ancient of the provinces of balladry, but it has some claim to be regarded as the central one in fame and in wealth--the one that yields the purest and richest ore of poetry. It is that wherein the passion and frenzy of love is not merely an element or a prominent motive, but is the controlling spirit and the absorbing interest. As has been acknowledged, it is not possible to make any hard and fast division of the Scottish ballads by applying to them this or any other test; and mention has already been made, on account of the mythological or superstitious features they possess, of a number of the choicest of these old lays that turn essentially upon the strength or the weakness, the constancy or the inconstancy, the rapture or the sorrow of earthly love. Love in the ballads is nearly always masterful, imperious, exacting; nearly always its reward is death and dule, and not life and happiness. But as it spurns all obstacles, it meets its fate unflinchingly. No sacrifices are too great, no penance too dire, no shame or sin too black to turn aside for an instant the rush of this impetuous passion, which runs bare-breasted on the drawn sword. It is not to the ballads we must go for example--precept of this or of any kind there is none--in the _bourgeois_ and respectable virtues; of the sober and chastened behaviour that comes of a prudent fear of consequences, of a cold temperament and a calculating spirit. The good or the ill done by the heroes and heroines of the Romantic Ballad is done on the spur of the moment, on the impulse of hot blood. Whether it be sin or sacrifice, the prompting is not that of convention, but of Nature herself. Love and hate, though they may burn and glow like a volcano, are not prodigal of words. It is one of the marks by which we may distinguish the characters in the ballads from those in later and more cultivated fields of literature that, as a rule, they say less rather than more than they mean. They speak daggers; but they are far more apt in using them. At a word or look the lovers are ready to die for each other; but of the language of endearment they are not prodigal; and a phrase of tenderness is sweet in proportion that it is rare. With the tamer affections it fares no better than with the moral law when it comes in the path of the master passion. Mother and sisters are defied and forsaken; father and brethren are resisted at the sword's point when they cross, as is their wont, the course of true love. It is curious to note how little, except as a foil, the ballad makes of brotherly or sisterly love. It finds exquisite expression in the tale of _Chil Ether_ and his twin sister, 'Who loved each other tenderly 'Boon everything on earth.