about to catch up the falling diadem of Byzantium and place it on his brow. For the Bosnian Serb seems to forget the narrower traditions of his half alien kingdom in these more glorious legends, which override the cant of geographers and diplomatists, and make him see a brother in the Serb of the Black Mountain or Old Serbia, or the free Principality; and, indeed, he too has some claims to share these memories, for the city of the Serbian Cæsars, Prizren the Czarigrad, lies within the Bosnian limits. Doleful, then, as these strains may seem to a civilised ears, it ill becomes the stranger to mock at them. Over those rude men they seemed to exercise a kind of charm. The hearers of the bard to whom I was listening seemed never to grow weary. Every now and then an ecstatic thrill would run through the whole circle, and find utterance in inarticulate murmurs of delight. So carried away are the emotions of the listeners, that it is by no means rare—though I did not witness this;—for them to be moved to tears. ‘I cannot describe,’ says an observer,[177] ‘the pathos with which these songs are sometimes sung. I have witnessed crowds surrounding a blind old singer, and every cheek was wet with tears; it was not the music, but the words, which affected them.’ For these songs speak to the heart. They are instinct with that natural simplicity which is the very soul of pathos. True, there is lacking something of the tremendous energy of our old Teutonic sagas. There is less sword-play; but there is more poetry. We should never expect to find an Anglo-Saxon gleeman of our epic days likening, as does one of these unlettered Bosnian bards, the cheeks of the loved one to the flush of dawn and her eyelids to the silken wings of swallows. This airiness of phantasy, the brilliance of the imagery, seem to witness the close communion of the race with the Oriental world around them; but there is a national sobriety ever bridling the imagination, just as we have seen the Oriental gorgeousness of a Serbian lady’s dress tempered with something of the homely Serbian house-mother. But what, perhaps, is more striking than all, is to find the rude simplicity of Homer combined with a dramatic force more characteristic of the age of Euripides.[178] Surely in such spring flowers—and wintry indeed has been the spring of this poor Bosnian stem!—is to be found the best proof that the stock is not all cankered, and the surest earnest of fruits to ripen yet. In a poetry that has received the reverent homage of Goethe it cannot be fanciful to see a token that the race is capable of attaining to the highest pinnacles of civilisation. It can hardly be unreasonable to seek here for a retort against those who speak of the South Sclavonic rayah as an utterly degraded being, and who cannot discern that He still retains, ’Mid much abasement, what he has received From Nature—an intense and glowing mind.