The Polish nation has an ancient hymn, which may be said to belong in some measure to popular poetry.  It is known under the name of Boga Rodzica, or God’s Mother; and is said to have been composed by St. Adalbert, who lived at the end of the tenth century.  According to Niemcewicz, the Polish poet, it was still chanted in the year 1812 in the churches of Kola and Gnesen, the places where St. Adalbert lived and died.  It is a prayer to the Virgin, ending with a sixfold Amen; and was formerly sung by the soldiers when advancing to battle.  For that reason probably we find it frequently called a war song.

The popular ballads, published by Woicicki and Zegota Pauli, are not distinguished in any way from those still extant among the Slovakians, Bohemians, and Lusatian Sorabians.  It can only be matter of surprise, that they have imbibed no more of the wild and romantic character of the ballads sung by the Ruthenians, with whom they live intermingled in several regions.  They are ruder in form; and alternately rhymed, or distinguished from prose only by a certain irregular but prosodic measure, sometimes trochaic, but mostly dactylic.  With the classical beauty of the Servian songs they can bear no comparison; in which latter the perfect absence of vulgarity may perhaps be partly accounted for, by their having been produced among a people where no privileged classes exist.  Only in their wedding songs, and other similar ones, is there a striking affinity; it is in general in these relics of ancient times, that the popular poetry of the nations of the Eastern and of the Western Stems meet in one distinct and fundamental accord.

Many of the more ancient ballads extant among the Poles we find also in one or other of the Western Slavic languages.  For example, the following; which exists in the Vendish language in a shape more diffuse and twice as long; and also in Slovakian, still more sketchlike.  That the Polish ballad is derived from a time, when the horrid invasions of the Tartars were at least still distinctly remembered, we may safely conclude.  In the Slovakian ballad the invaders are called Turks; in the Vendish ballad, probably the latest of the three, they have lost all individual nationality, and have become merely “enemies,” or “robbers.”

  THE INVASION OF THE TARTARS.[60]

  Plundering are the Tartars,
  Plundering Jashdow castle.

  All the people fled,
  Only a lad they met.

  “Where’s thy lord, my lad? 
  Where and in what tower
  Is thy lady’s bower?”

  “I must not betray him,
  Lest my lord should slay me.”

  “Not his anger fear,
  Thou shalt stay not here,
  Thou shalt go with us.”

  “My lord’s and lady’s bower
  Is in the highest tower.”

  Once the Tartars shot,
  And they hit them not.

  Twice the Tartars shot,
  And they killed the lord.

  Thrice the Tartars shot—­
  They are breaking in the tower,
  The lady is in their power.