The Slavic popular ballads, like the Spanish, very seldom lay any claim to completeness.  They do not pretend to give you a whole story, but only a scene.  They are, for the most part, little pictures of isolated situations, from which it is left to the imagination of the hearers to infer the whole.  The narrative part is almost always descriptive, and, as such, eminently plastic.  If the picture represented has not the dramatic vivacity of the ballads of the Teutonic nations, it has the distinctness, the prominent forms, and often the perfection of the best executed bas-reliefs of the ancients.  Like these, the Slavic poems seldom represent wild passions or complicated actions; but, by preference, scenes of rest, and mostly scenes of domestic grief or joy.  When we look at the celebrated Greek bas-relief, which represents an affianced maiden the evening before her wedding, weeping, or bashfully hiding her fair face, while a servant girl washes her feet,[7] we cannot help being impressed with just the same feelings, which seize us when we hear or read one of the numerous Slavic songs devoted to similar scenes.  To illustrate our remarks, and to make our readers understand exactly what we call the plastic character of Slavic popular songs, we insert here the following Servian love-scene.  We add, that it was one of Goethe’s favourites, worthy, in his opinion, to be compared with the Canticles.[8] There is a melody in the language of this song, not to be imitated in any translation.  We confess that Frederic Schlegel’s definition of architecture, “frozen music,” occurs to us when we read it in the original.

JOVO AND MARIA.

  ’Cross the field a breeze it bore the roses,
  Bore them far into the tent of Jovo;
  In the tent were Jovo and Maria,
  Jovo writing and Maria broidering. 
  Used has Jovo all his ink and paper,
  Used Maria all her burnished gold-thread. 
  Thus accosted Jovo then Maria;
  “O sweet love, my dearest soul, Maria,
  Tell me, is my soul then dear unto thee? 
  Or my hand find’st thou it hard to rest on?”
  Then with gentle voice replied Maria;
  “O, in faith, my heart and soul, my Jovo,
  Dearer is to me thy soul, O dearest,
  Than my brothers, all the four together. 
  Softer is thy hand to me to rest on,
  Than four cushions, softest of the soft ones."[9]

The high antiquity of Slavic popular poetry is manifest among other things, in the frequent mythological features which occur.  In the ballads of the Teutonic nations, we recollect very few instances of talking animals.  As to those which talk in nursery tales, we are always sure to discover in them enchanted princes or princesses.  In one Scotch ballad, “The Gray Goshawk,” a horse speaks; and, in a few other instances, falcons and nightingales.  In Spanish popular poetry we do not meet with a single similar example.  In the songs of all the Slavic nations, conversing, thinking,