contessa Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo-Cesaresco

“ It should not be forgotten, when reading these Armenian bird-lays, that an old belief yet survives in that country that the souls of the blessed dead fly down from heaven, in the shape of beautiful birds, and perching in the branches of the trees, look fondly at their dear ones on earth as they pass beneath. When the peasant sees the birds fluttering above overhead in the wood he will on no account molest them, but says to his boy, "That is your dear mother, your little brother, your sister—be a good child, or it will fly away and never look at you again with its sweet little eyes." ”

“ Reapers, to labour begin, as soon as the lark upriseth,
And when he sleeps, leave off, yet rest when the sun overpowers.
Blest, O youths, is the life of a frog, for he never is anxious
Who is to pour him his drink, for he always has plenty.
Better at once, O miserly steward, to boil our lentils;
Mind you don't cut your fingers in trying to chop them to atoms.
These are the songs for the toilers to sing in the heat of the harvest.
Most modern harvest songs manage, like that of Theocritus, to convey some hint of thirst or hunger. "Be merry, O comrades!" ”

“ The Bulgarian sees a mountain trembling to the song of three nightingales. Like his Servian neighbours, he must always have a story, and here is his nightingale story. Marika went into the garden; she passed the pomegranate-tree and the apple-tree, and sat her down under the red rose-tree to embroider a white handkerchief. In the rose-tree was a nightingale, and the nightingale said: "Let us sing, Marika; if you sing better than I, you shall cut off my wings at the shoulders and my feet at the knee; if I sing better than you, I will cut off your hair at the roots." ”

“ The Christkind in His mythical attributes is nearer to Kolyada than to the Italian Bambinello. He belongs to the people, not to the Church. He is not swathed in jewelled swaddling clothes; His limbs are free, and He has wings that carry Him wheresoever good children abide. There is about Him all the dreamy charm of lands where twilight is long and shade and shine intermingle softly, and where the earth's wintry winding-sheet is more beautiful than her April bride gown. The most popular of German lullabies is a truly Teutonic mixture of piety, wonder-lore, and homeliness. ”

“ The same tribe give this vivid description of a day-break scene: "The trader betakes himself to his trade, the spinner takes his distaff, the warrior takes his shield, the weaver bends over his sley, the farmer awakes, he and his hoe-handle, the hunter awakes, with his quiver and bow." Thoughtless of toil, the Tuscan joyfully cries, "Dawn is about to appear, bells chime, windows open, heaven and earth sing." The Greek holds that he who has not journeyed with the moon by night, or at dawn with the dew, has not tasted the world. ”

“ Who can say how much it has done to make society possible, to keep the world on its wheels? It is the bond that binds together all religions. Six thousand years ago the ancient Egyptian dirge-singers chanted before their dead: "There is no fault in him. No answer riseth up against him. In the truth he liveth, with the truth he nourisheth himself. The gods are satisfied with all he hath done.... He succoured the afflicted, he gave bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, he sheltered the outcast, his doors were open to the stranger, he was a father to the fatherless." ”

“ Some comfort may be got from hearing Greek spoken at Ammendolea, itself an eyrie, and again at Condufuri. A last, long, resolute effort brings you, in spite of your forebodings, to Bova, real as far as stones and fountains, men and women, and lightly-clothed children can make it; yet still half a dream, you think, when you sit on the terrace at sunset and look across the blue Ionian to the outline, unbroken from base to crown, of "Snowy Ætna, nurse of endless frost, the prop of heaven." ”

“ He has not eaten the fruit of the vine; he has built a wine-vat, but the wine he has not tasted; he has brought cool streams from the hills, but he has not drunk the water thereof; he has planted red and white roses, but he has not smelt their fragrance. The turtle-dove sings to the birds, and the spring is come. Gabriel calls to his soul, the light of his eyes grows dim; "It is time I leave my vineyard, my beautiful vineyard." There is hardly another poem treating of death which is so un-illuminated by one ray from a future dawn. ”

“ The poor girl says to her better-to-do lover, "Thou passest this way sad and grieving, thou thinkest to speak to my father, and on thy finger thou dost carry a little ring. But thy thought does not fall in with my thought, and thy thought is not worth a gazette. Thou art rich and I am a poor little one!" Here the girl puts all faith in the good intentions of her suitor: it is not his fault if her poverty divides them; it is the nature of things, against which there is no appeal. ”

“ The mournfully beautiful music that Schubert wedded to Claudius's little poem Der Tod und das Mädchen might serve as melodious expression to many a one of these Grecian lays of dead damsels. Death will not halt because he hears a voice crying: "Tarry, I am still so young!" The future is as irrevocably fixed as the past; and if fate deals hardly by mortals, there is nothing to fall back upon but the sorry resignation of despair; such is the sombre folk philosophy of the land of eternal summer. ”

“ In how many tongues are not these words spoken every day by trembling lips, whilst the heart seems to stand still, whilst the eyes dare not weep, for tears would mean the victory of hope or fear; whilst the watcher leans expectant over the beloved little wasted form, conscious that all that can be done has been done, that all that care or skill can try has been tried, that there are no other remedies to fall back upon, that there is no more strength left for battle, and that now, even in this very hour, sleep or his brother death will decide the issue. ”

“ Popular poetry is the reflection of moments of strong collective or individual emotion. The springs of legend and poetry issue from the deepest wells of national life; the very heart of a people is laid bare in its sagas and songs. There have been times when a profound feeling of race or patriotism has sufficed to turn a whole nation into poets: this happened at the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the struggle for the Stuarts in Scotland, for independence in Greece. ”

“ A herdsman or tiller of the soil strings together a few verses embodying some simple thought which came into his head whilst he looked at the green fields or the blue skies, or it may be as he acted in a humble way as village poet-laureate. One or two friends get them by heart, and possibly sing them at the fair in the next hamlet: if they hit, others catch them up, and so the song travels for miles and miles, and may live out generations. ”

“ Research into funeral rites, of whatever nature, confronts us with much that would be ludicrous were it not so very pitiful, for humanity has displayed a fatal tendency to rush into the committal of ghastly absurdities by way of showing the most sacred kind of grief. Yet, take them all in all, the death laments of the people form a striking and beautiful manifestation of such homage as "Life may give for love to death." ”

“ They inhabit every house in which a fire burns. If offended by their host, they revenge themselves on the children: the mother finds the infant whom she left asleep and tucked into the cradle, rolling on the floor or screaming with sudden fright. When, however, the Ronni-di-casa are amiably disposed, they make the sleeping child smile, after the fashion of angels in other parts of the world. Should they wish to leave an unmistakable mark of their good will, they twist a lock of the baby's hair into an inextricable tress. ”

“ No one has stayed in the Hellenic kingdom without noticing the pride that goes along with the name of Greek—a pride which it is excusable to smile at, but which yet has both its touching and its practical aspect, for it has remade a nation. The Greeks of Southern Italy have always had their share of a like feeling. "We are not ashamed of our race, Greeks we are, and we glory in it," wrote De Ferraris, a Greek born at Galatone in 1444, and the words would be warmly endorsed by the enlightened citizens of Bova and Ammendolea, who quarrel as to which of the two places gave birth to Praxiteles. ”

“ VENETIAN FOLK-SONGS.
To the idealised vision that goes along with hereditary culture a large town may seem an impressive spectacle. For Wordsworth, worshipper of nature though he was, earth had not anything to show more fair than London from Westminster Bridge, and Victor Hugo found endless inspiration on the top of a Parisian omnibus. As shrines of art, as foci of historic memories, even simply as vast aggregates of human beings working out the tragi-comedy of life, great cities have furnished the key-note to much fine poetry. ”

“ A brave little Venetian maiden cries: "How many there are who desire fortune! and I, poor little thing, desire it not. This is the fortune I desire, to wed a youth of twenty-one years." One lover pines for riches, but only that he may offer them to his beloved: "Fair Marieta, I wish to make my fortune, to go where the Turk has his cradle, and work myself nearly to death, so that afterwards I may come back to thee, my fair one, and marry thee." Finally, a town youth says that if his country love has but a milk-pail for her dowry, what matters? ”

“ The slight natural touches—the eagle soaring against the sunrise, the nightingale singing through the May nights—suggest an intuition of the will-of-the-wisp affinity between nature and human chances which seems for ever on the point of being seized, but which for ever eludes the mental grasp. We think of the "brown bird" in the noble "Funeral Song" of one who would have been a magnificent folk-poet, had he not learnt to write and read—Walt Whitman. ”

“ The Roumanians call death "the betrothed of the world:" that which awaits. The Neapolitans give it the name of la vedova: that which survives. It would be easy to go on multiplying the stock of contrasting epithets. Inevitable yet a surprise, of daily incidence yet a mystery, unvarying yet most various, a common fact yet incapable of becoming common-place, death may be looked at from innumerable points of view; but, look at it how we will, it moves and excites our spiritual consciousness as nothing else can do. The first poet of human things was perhaps one who stood in the presence of death. ”

“ But there is more than one song that betrays the suspicion that if a girl grows poor her lover will be only too eager and ready to desert her. "My lady mother has always told me that she who falls into poverty loses her lover; loses friend and loses hope. The purse does not sing when there is no coin in it." Still, on the whole, a more high-minded view prevails. "Do not look to my being a poor man," says one lover,
Che povatà no guasta gentilissa,
—"for poverty does not spoil or prevent gentle manners." ”

“ Even now the mother-in-law of Italian folk-songs is a formidable personage; to say the truth, there is no scant measure of self-congratulation when she happens not to exist. "Oh! Dio del siel, mandeme un ziovenin senza madona!" is the heartfelt prayer of the Venetian girl.
If the youth thinks of the wedding day as the occasion of forming new ties—above all that dearest tie which will give him his anzola bela for his own—the maiden dreams of it as the zornada santa ”

“ The folk-poet sings because heaven has given him a sweet voice and a fair mistress; because the earth brings forth her increase and the sun shines, and the spring comes back, and rest at noontide and at evening is lovely, and work in the oil-mill and in the vineyard is lovely too: he sings to embellish his labour and to enhance his repose. He lives on the shield of Achilles, singing, accompanied by a viol, to the grape-pickers; he is crowned with flowers in the golden age of Lucretius as he raises his sweet song at the festa. ”

“ The souls of the wicked only see their homes as if they were near them: they see their last wishes disregarded, everything upside down, their substance squandered, the husband prepares to take a new wife, strangers possess the old estate, in their misery the dead man's family curse him, his children become corrupt, lands are gone, the house is burnt, the wife sees her husband tortured, the husband sees his wife stricken down with mortal disease; friends forget: "some perhaps for the sake of bygone times may stroke the coffin and let fall a tear, departing with a cold smile." ”

“ There are women who laugh and enjoy themselves while I chafe my very life out. Listen to me, child; beautiful is the lullaby and all the folk are asleep—but thou, no! My wise little son, I look about for thy equal; nowhere do I find him. Thou art mamma's consolation. There, do sleep just a little while." So pleads the Sicilian; her Venetian sister tries to soften the obduracy of her infant by still more plaintive remonstrances. "Hushaby; but if thou dost not sleep, hear me. ”

“ It is pleasant to turn from these several sections of Sicilian verse, which, though valuable in helping us to know the people from whom they spring, for the most part have but small merits when judged as poetry, to the stream of genuine song which flows side by side with them: a stream, fresh, clear, pure: a poesy always true in its artless art, generally bright and ingenious in its imagery, sometimes tersely felicitous in its expression. ”