Then up bespake the bride’s mother-- She never was heard to speak so free: ‘Ye’ll not forsake my only daughter, Though Susie Pye has cross’d the sea.’ (_Young Beichan_) ‘An’ thu sall marry a proud gunner, An’ a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be.’ (_The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie_) Rise up, rise up, brother Dives, And go with us to see A dismal place, prepared in hell, To sit on a serpent’s knee. (_Dives and Lazarus_) or, merely flat and pedestrian: There was slayne upon the English part For sooth as I you say, Of ninè thousand English men Five hundred came away. (_Otterburn_) But it is always unmistakable and like no other thing in poetry; in proof of which let me offer one simple, practical test. If any man ever steeped himself in balladry, that man was Scott, and once or twice, as in _Proud Maisie_ and _Brignall Banks_, he came near to distil the essence. If any man, taking the Ballad for his model, has ever sublimated its feeling and language in a poem seraphically free From taint of personality, that man was Coleridge and that poem his _Ancient Mariner_. If any poet now alive can be called a ballad-writer of genius, it is the author of _Danny Deever_ and _East and West_. But let the reader suppose a fascicule of such poems bound up with the present collection, and he will perceive that I could have gone no straighter way to destroy the singularity of the book. In claiming this singularity for the Ballad I do not seek to exalt it above any other lyrical form. Rather I am ready to admit, out of some experience in anthologizing, that when a ballad is set in a collection alongside the best of Herrick, Gray, Landor, Browning--to name four poets opposite as the poles and to say nothing of such masterwork as Spenser’s _Epithalamion_ or Milton’s _Lycidas_--it is the ballad that not only suffers by the apposition but suffers to a surprising degree; so that I have sometimes been forced to reconsider my affection, and ask ‘Are these ballads really beautiful as they have always appeared to me?’ In truth (as I take it) the contrast is unfair to them, much as any contrast between children and grown folk would be unfair. They appealed to something young in the national mind, and the young still ramp through Percy’s _Reliques_--as I hope they will through this book--‘trailing clouds of glory,’ following the note in Elmond’s wood-- May Margaret sits in her bower door Sewing her silken seam; She heard a note in Elmond’s wood, And wish’d she there had been. She loot the seam fa’ frae her side, The needle to her tae, And she is on to Elmond’s wood As fast as she could gae. A. Q. C. FOOTNOTES: