however, were doubtless given by one person in a sort of recitative; this is the case with modern ballads of Russia and Servia, where the bystanders now and then join in a chorus.  Precisely in the same way ballads were divorced from the dance, originally their vital condition; but in the refrain, which is attached to so many ballads, one finds an element which has survived from those earliest days of communal song.

Of oldest communal poetry no actual ballad has come down to us.  Hints and even fragments, however, are pointed out in ancient records, mainly as the material of chronicle or legend.  In the Bible (Numbers xxi. 17), where “Israel sang this song,” we are not going too far when we regard the fragment as part of a communal ballad.  “Spring up, O well:  sing ye unto it:  the princes digged the well, the nobles of the people digged it, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves.”  Deborah’s song has something of the communal note; and when Miriam dances and sings with her maidens, one is reminded of the many ballads made by dancing and singing bands of women in mediaeval Europe,—­for instance, the song made in the seventh century to the honor of St. Faro, and “sung by the women as they danced and clapped their hands.”  The question of ancient Greek ballads, and their relation to the epic, is not to be discussed here; nor can we make more than an allusion to the theory of Niebuhr that the early part of Livy is founded on, old Roman ballads.  A popular discussion of this matter may be found in Macaulay’s preface to his own ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’  The ballads of modern Europe are a survival of older communal poetry, more or less influenced by artistic and individual conditions of authorship, but wholly impersonal, and with an appeal to our interest which seems to come from a throng and not from the solitary poet.  Attention was early called to the ballads of Spain; printed at first as broadsides, they were gathered into a volume as early as 1550.  On the other hand, ballads were neglected in France until very recent times; for specimens of the French ballad, and for an account of it, the reader should consult Professor Crane’s ’Chansons Populaires de France,’ New York, 1891.  It is with ballads of the Germanic race, however, that we are now concerned.  Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Faroe Islands; Scotland and England; the Netherlands and Germany:  all of these countries offer us admirable specimens of the ballad.  Particularly, the great collections of Grundtvig (’Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser’) for Denmark, and of Child (’The English and Scottish Popular Ballads’) for our own tongue, show how common descent or borrowing connects the individual ballads of these groups.  “Almost every Norwegian, Swedish, or Icelandic ballad,” says Grundtvig, “is found in a Danish version of Scandinavian ballads; moreover, a larger number can be found in English and Scottish versions than in German or Dutch versions.”  Again, we find certain national preferences in the character