The popular ballad, as it is understood for the purpose of these selections, is a narrative in lyric form, with no traces of individual authorship, and is preserved mainly by oral tradition.  In its earliest stages it was meant to be sung by a crowd, and got its name from the dance to which it furnished the sole musical accompaniment.  In these primitive communities the ballad was doubtless chanted by the entire folk, in festivals mainly of a religious character.  Explorers still meet something of the sort in savage tribes:  and children’s games preserve among us some relics of this protoplasmic form of verse-making, in which the single poet or artist was practically unknown, and spontaneous, improvised verses arose out of the occasion itself; in which the whole community took part; and in which the beat of foot—­along with the gesture which expressed narrative elements of the song—­was inseparable from the words and the melody.  This native growth of song, in which the chorus or refrain, the dance of a festal multitude, and the spontaneous nature of the words, were vital conditions, gradually faded away before the advance of cultivated verse and the vigor of production in what one may call poetry of the schools.  Very early in the history of the ballad, a demand for more art must have called out or at least emphasized the artist, the poet, who chanted new verses while the throng kept up the refrain or burden.  Moreover, as interest was concentrated upon the words or story, people began to feel that both dance and melody were separable if not alien features; and thus they demanded the composed and recited ballad, to the harm and ultimate ruin of that spontaneous song for the festal, dancing crowd.  Still, even when artistry had found a footing in ballad verse, it long remained mere agent and mouthpiece for the folk; the communal character of the ballad was maintained in form and matter.  Events of interest were sung in almost contemporary and entirely improvised verse; and the resulting ballads, carried over the borders of their community and passed down from generation to generation, served as newspaper to their own times and as chronicle to posterity.  It is the kind of song to which Tacitus bears witness as the sole form of history among the early Germans; and it is evident that such a stock of ballads must have furnished considerable raw material to the epic.  Ballads, in whatever original shape, went to the making of the English ‘Beowulf,’ of the German ‘Nibelungenlied.’  Moreover, a study of dramatic poetry leads one back to similar communal origins.  What is loosely called a “chorus,”—­originally, as the name implies, a dance—­out of which older forms of the drama were developed, could be traced back to identity with primitive forms of the ballad.  The purely lyrical ballad, even, the chanson of the people, so rare in English but so abundant among other races, is evidently a growth from the same root.