Andrew Lang

“ A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke ‘and the numbers came’; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters. ”

“ Green is their garden and orchard, with rare fruits golden it glows,
And the souls of the Blessed are glad in the pleasures on Earth that they knew,
p. 222And in chariots these have delight, and in dice and in minstrelsy those,
And the savour of sacrifice clings to the altars and rises anew.
But the Souls that Persephone cleanses from ancient pollution and stain,
These at the end of the age, be they prince, be they singer, or seer ”

“ So many have gone ‘into the world of light’ that it is a happiness to think of him to whom The Ballade of Golf was dedicated, and to remember that he is still capable of scoring his double century at cricket, and of lifting the ball high over the trees beyond the boundaries of a great cricket-field. ”

“ Our verses all were threnodies,
In elegiacs still we whined;
Our ears were deaf, our eyes were blind,
We sought and knew not what we sought.
We marvel, now we look behind:
Life’s more amusing than we thought! ”

“ The blossoms and buds upon breasts and tresses,
The light burned white in your faces fair?”
“In a falling fane have we built our house,
With the dying Gods we have held carouse,
And our lips are wan from their wild caresses,
Our hands are filled with their holy boughs. ”

“ The once beautiful ruins carpeted with grass and wild flowers have been doubly desecrated by persons, academic persons, having authority and a plentiful lack of taste. The slim mountain-ashes, fair as the young palm-tree that Odysseus saw beside the shrine of Apollo in Delos, have been cut down by the academic persons to whom power is given. ”

“ And he married the Echo one fortunate morn,
p. 116And Woman, their beautiful daughter, was born!
The daughter of Sunshine and Echo she came
With a voice like a song, with a face like a flame;
With a face like a flame, and a voice like a song,
And happy was Man, but it was not for long!
For weather’s a painfully changeable thing,
Not always the child of the Echo would sing;
And the face of the Sun may be hidden with mist,
And his child can be terribly cross if she list.
And unfortunate Man had to learn with surprise
That a frown’s not peculiar to masculine eyes;
That the sweetest of voices can scold and can sneer, ”

“ This maiden with locks that are flowing and free.
This maiden so gentle, so kind, and so fair,
With a flower like a star in the night of her hair.
With her eyes like the smoke that is misty and blue,
With her heart that is heavenly, and tender, and true.
She will die in the night, but no need you should mourn,
You shall bury her body and thence shall be born
A weed that is green, that is fragrant and fair,
With a flower like the star in the night of her hair.
And the leaves must ye burn till they offer to you
p. 118Soft smoke, like her eyes that are misty and blue. ”

“ The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: “When you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good p. 3deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg.” Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. ”

“ Whose flower is faded and whose locks are hoar,
Yet haste, light skiffs, where myrtle thickets smile;
Love’s panthers sleep ’mid roses, as of yore:
“It may be we shall touch the happy isle!”
p. 33ENVOY.
Sad eyes! the blue sea laughs, as heretofore.
Ah, singing birds your happy music pour!
Ah, poets, leave the sordid earth awhile;
Flit to these ancient gods we still adore:
“It may be we shall touch the happy isle!”
p. 34BALLADE OF THE SUMMER TERM. (Being a Petition, in the form of a Ballade, praying the University Commissioners to spare the Summer Term.) ”

“ In the Aves of Aristophanes, the Bird Chorus declare that they are older than the Gods, and greater benefactors of men. This idea recurs in almost all savage mythologies, and I have made the savage Bird-gods state their own case. ”

“ The ghosts we all can raise at will!
p. 158LOVE’S EASTER. SONNET.
Love died here
Long ago;
O’er his bier,
Lying low,
Poppies throw;
Shed no tear;
Year by year,
Roses blow!
Year by year,
Adon—dear
To Love’s Queen—
Does not die!
Wakes when green
May is nigh!
p. 159BALLADE OF THE GIRTON GIRL. She has just “put her gown on” at Girton,
She is learned in Latin and Greek,
But lawn tennis she plays with a skirt on
That the prudish remark with a shriek. ”

“ I never wrote a double ballade, and stanzas four and five of the Double Ballade of Primitive Man were contributed by the learned doyen of Anthropology, Mr. E. B. Tylor, author of Primitive Culture.
À tout seigneur tout honneur!
In Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre, the Windburg is a hill in Teviotdale. A Portrait of 1783 was written on a French engraving after Morland, and Benedetta Ramus was addressed to a mezzotint (an artist’s proof, ‘very rare’) . ”

“ Thirty years ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, æsthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.
The ballade was an old French form of verse, in France revived by Théodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long forgotten the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Edmund Gosse. They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first to reintroduce these pleasant old French p. 2nugae, while an anonymous author let loose upon the town a whole winged flock of ballades of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley ”

“ One burden answers, ever and aye,
“Nay, but where is the last year’s snow?”
p. 59VILLON’S BALLADE
OF GOOD COUNSEL, TO HIS FRIENDS OF EVIL LIFE. Nay, be you pardoner or cheat,
Or cogger keen, or mumper shy,
You’ll burn your fingers at the feat,
And howl like other folks that fry.
All evil folks that love a lie! ”

“ When he rushed on the world and its woes,—
’Twas the manner of Primitive Man!
But the mild anthropologist,—he’s
Not recent inclined to suppose
Flints Palæolithic like these,
Quaternary bones such as those!
In Rhinoceros, Mammoth and Co.’s,
First epoch, the Human began,
Theologians all to expose,—
’Tis the mission of Primitive Man. ”

“ This belief that the living may visit, on occasion, the dwellings of the dead, but can never return to earth if they taste the food of the departed, is expressed in myths of worldwide distribution. Because she ate the pomegranate seed, Persephone became subject to the spell of Hades. In Apuleius, Psyche, when she visits the place of souls, is advised to abstain from food. Kohl found the myth among the Ojibbeways, Mr. ”

“ The Ballade of the Midnight Forest, the Ballade of the Huntress Artemis, was translated from Théodore de Banville, whose beautiful poem came so near the Greek, that when the late Provost of Oriel translated a part of its English shadow into Greek hexameters, you might suppose, as you read, that they were part of a lost Homeric Hymn. ”

“ Than Tweed’s, that through death’s twilight dim,
Mourned in the latest Minstrel’s ear!
p. 153TWILIGHT. SONNET.
(AFTER RICHEPIN.)
Light has flown!
Through the grey
The wind’s way
The sea’s moan
Sound alone!
For the day
These repay
And atone!
Scarce I know,
Listening so
To the streams
Of the sea,
If old dreams
Sing to me!
p. 154BALLADE OF SUMMER. TO C. H. ARKCOLL.
When strawberry pottles are common and cheap,
Ere elms be black, or limes be sere,
When midnight dances are murdering sleep,
Then comes in the sweet o’ the year! ”

“ The sonnet, Natural Theology, is the germ of p. 6what the author has since written, in The Making of Religion, on the long neglected fact that many of the lowest savages known share the belief in a benevolent All Father and Judge of men.
Concerning verses in Rhymes à la Mode, visitors to St. Andrews may be warned not to visit St. ”

“ Well, these rules they were made in the wattle-gum shade, and were strictly obeyed, when the Crow was the King. [210d]
p. 211Thus on Earth’s little ball to the Birds you owe all, yet your gratitude’s small for the favours they’ve done,
And their feathers you pill, and you eat them at will, yes, you plunder and kill the bright birds one by one;
There’s a price on their head, and the Dodo is dead, and the Moa has fled from the sight of the sun! ”

“ And in India who for the Soma juice flew, and to men brought it through without falter or fail?
Why the Hawk ’twas again, and great Indra to men would appear, now and then, in the shape of a Quail,
While the Thlinkeet’s delight is the Bird of the Night, the beak and the bright ebon plumage of Yehl. [209b]
And who for man’s need brought the famed Suttung’s mead? why ’tis told in the creed of the Sagamen strong,
p. 210’Twas the Eagle god who brought the drink from the blue, and gave mortals the brew that’s the fountain of song. [210a]
Next, who gave men their laws? ”

“ Tak’ the best o’ advice that can be,
Tak’ aye tent to be up on the green!
p. 44DOUBLE BALLADE OF PRIMITIVE MAN. TO J. A. FARRER.
He lived in a cave by the seas,
He lived upon oysters and foes,
But his list of forbidden degrees,
An extensive morality shows;
Geological evidence goes
To prove he had never a pan,
But he shaved with a shell when he chose,—
’Twas the manner of Primitive Man. ”

“ And not the Night alone!”
p. 114WOMAN AND THE WEED. (FOUNDED ON A NEW ZEALAND MYTH.)
In the Morning of Time, when his fortunes began,
How bleak, how un-Greek, was the Nature of Man!
From his wigwam, if ever he ventured to roam,
There was nobody waiting to welcome him home;
For the Man had been made, but the woman had not,
And Earth was a highly detestable spot.
Man hated his neighbours ”

“ That I should write too much and live too long.’
p. 4The Ballade of the Tweed, and the Rhymes à la Mode, were dedicated to the dearest of kinsmen, a cricketer and angler. The Ballade of Roulette was inscribed to R. R., a gallant veteran of the Indian Mutiny, a leader of Light Horse, whose father was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. ”

“ Apparently Aristophanes preserved, in a burlesque form, the remnants of a genuine myth. Almost all savage religions have their bird-gods, and it is probable that Aristophanes did not invent, but p. 241only used a surviving myth of which there are scarcely any other traces in Greek literature. ”

“ The Hawk, in the myth of the Galinameros of Central California, lit up the Sun.
[208b] Pundjel, the Eagle Hawk, is the demiurge and “culture-hero” of several Australian tribes.
[208c] The Creation of Man is thus described by the Australians.
[209a] In Andaman, Thlinkeet, Melanesian, and other myths, a Bird is the Prometheus Purphoros ”

“ The grass and flowers have been rooted up. Hideous little wooden fences enclose the grave slabs: a roof of a massive kind has been dumped down on the old walls, and the windows, once so graceful in their airy p. ”

“ Clement Marot, Dialogue de deux Amoureux.
“I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.”
A Winter’s Tale, Act iv. sc. 3.
p. vCONTENTS. p. 1INTRODUCTION
Thirty years have passed, like a watch in the night, since the earlier of the two sets of verses here reprinted, Ballades in Blue China, was published. At first there were but twenty-two Ballades; ten more were added later. They appeared in a little white vellum wrapper, with a little blue Chinese singer copied from a porcelain jar ”

“ Deep in the ilex woods we wandered free,
p. 165When suddenly the forest glades were stirred
With waving pinions, and a great sea bird
Flew forth, like Shelley’s spirit, to the sea!
1880.
p. 166ROMANCE. My Love dwelt in a Northern land. ”