sympathizing animals are very common.  No one wonders at it.  The giant Tugarin Dragonson’s steed warns him of every danger.  The great hero Marko’s horse even weeps, when he feels that the death of his master approaches.  Nay, life is breathed even into inanimate objects by the imagination of Slavic girls and youths.  A Servian youth contracts a regular league of friendship and brotherhood with a bramble-bush, in order to induce it to catch his coy love’s clothes, when she flees before his kisses.  Even the stars and planets sympathize with human beings, and live in constant intercourse with them and their affairs.  Stars become messengers; a proud maiden boasts to be more beautiful than the sun; the sun takes it ill, and is advised to burn her coal-black in revenge.  The moon hides herself in the clouds when the great Tzar dies.  One of the most interesting Servian tale, called “The Heritage,” is the fruit of the moon and the morning star’s gossiping with each other.  It begins thus: 

  To the morning star the moon spake chiding;
  “Morning star, say where hast thou been wandering? 
  Where hast thou been wandering and where lingering,
  Where hast thou three full white days been lingering?”

  To the moon the morning star has answered;
  “I’ve been wandering, I’ve three days been lingering,
  O’er the white walls of the fortress Belgrade,
  Gazing there on strange events and wonders.”

The events which the star had witnessed, it now proceeds to relate to the moon; and these make the subject of this beautiful tale.

After having touched upon these general features, did our limits permit, we should speak more at large of those mythological beings of a more distinct character, which belong to the individual Slavic races; for example, the Vila of the Servians, the Russalki of the Malo-Russians, and the like; at least so far as this belief is interwoven in their poetry, the only respect in which it concerns us here.  But we must confine ourselves to a few brief remarks.

The strong and deeply-rooted superstitions of the Slavic nations are partly manifest in their songs and tales; these are full of foreboding dreams, and good or bad omens; witchcraft of various kinds is practised; and a certain oriental fatalism seems to direct will and destiny.  The connection with the other world appears nevertheless much looser, than is the case with the Teutonic nations.  There is no trace of spirits in Russian ballads; although spectres appear occasionally in Russian nursery tales.  In Servian, Bohemian, and Slovakian songs, it occurs frequently, that the voices of the dead sound from their graves; and thus a kind of soothing intercourse is kept up between the living and the departed.  The superstition of a certain species of blood-sucking spectres, known to the novel reading world under the name of vampyres, a superstition retained chiefly in Dalmatia, belongs also here.  In modern Greek,