“The king sits in Dumferling town.”

begins one of the noblest of all ballads; while one of the greatest of modern poems opens with something personal and pathetic, key-note to all that follows:—­

     “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
     My sense ...”

Even when a great poet essays the ballad, either he puts sentiment into it, or else he keeps sentiment out of it by a tour de force.  Admirable and noble as one must call the conclusion of an artistic ballad such as Tennyson’s ‘Revenge,’ it is altogether different from the conclusion of such a communal ballad as ‘Sir Patrick Spens.’  That subtle quality of the ballad which lies in solution with the story and which—­as in ’Child Maurice’ or ‘Babylon’ or ’Edward’—­compels in us sensations akin to those called out by the sentiment of the poet, is a wholly impersonal if strangely effective quality, far removed from the corresponding elements of the poem of art.  At first sight, one might say that Browning’s dramatic lyrics had this impersonal quality.  But compare the close of ‘Give a Rouse,’ chorus and all, with the close of ‘Child Maurice,’ that swift and relentless stroke of pure tragedy which called out the enthusiasm of so great a critic as Gray.

The narrative of the communal ballad is full of leaps and omissions; the style is simple to a fault; the diction is spontaneous and free.  Assonance frequently takes the place of rhyme, and a word often rhymes with itself.  There is a lack of poetic adornment in the style quite as conspicuous as the lack of reflection and moralizing in the matter.  Metaphor and simile are rare and when found are for the most part standing phrases common to all the ballads; there is never poetry for poetry’s sake.  Iteration is the chief mark of ballad style; and the favorite form of this effective figure is what one may call incremental repetition.  The question is repeated with the answer; each increment in a series of related facts has a stanza for itself, identical, save for the new fact, with the other stanzas.  ‘Babylon’ furnishes good instances of this progressive iteration.  Moreover, the ballad differs from earlier English epics in that it invariably has stanzas and rhyme; of the two forms of stanza, the two-line stanza with a refrain is probably older than the stanza with four or six lines.

This necessary quality of the stanza points to the origin of the ballad in song; but longer ballads, such as those that make up the ’Gest of Robin Hood,’ an epic in little, were not sung as lyrics or to aid the dance, but were either chanted in a monotonous fashion or else recited outright.  Chappell, in his admirable work on old English music (’Music of the Olden Time,’ ii. 790), names a third class of “characteristic airs of England,”—­the “historical and very long ballads, ... invariably of simple construction, usually plaintive....  They were rarely if ever used for dancing.”  Most of the longer ballads,