lays.’  Passing from lip to lip and from district to district, it receives additions and alterations, and becomes the property of a score of provinces.  Meanwhile the poet from whose soul it blossomed that first morning like a flower, remains contented with obscurity.  The wind has carried from his lips the thistledown of song, and sown it on a hundred hills and meadows, far and wide.  After such wise is the birth of all truly popular compositions.  Who knows, for instance, the veritable author of many of those mighty German chorals which sprang into being at the period of the Reformation?  The first inspiration was given, probably, to a single mind; but the melody, as it has reached us, is the product of a thousand.  This accounts for the variations which in different dialects and districts the same song presents.  Meanwhile, it is sometimes possible to trace the authorship of a ballad with marked local character to an improvisatore famous in his village, or to one of those professional rhymesters whom the country-folk employ in the composition of love-letters to their sweethearts at a distance.[25] Tommaseo, in the preface to his ’Canti Popolari,’ mentions in particular a Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani, whose poetry was famous through the mountains of Pistoja; and Tigri records by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made rispetti by the dozen as she watched her sheep upon the hills.  One of the songs in his collection (p. 181) contains a direct reference to the village letter-writer:—­

  Salutatemi, bella, lo scrivano;
  Non lo conosco e non so chi si sia. 
  A me mi pare un poeta sovrano,
  Tanto gli e sperto nella poesia.[26]

While I am writing thus about the production and dissemination of these love-songs, I cannot help remembering three days and nights which I once spent at sea between Genoa and Palermo, in the company of some conscripts who were going to join their regiment in Sicily.  They were lads from the Milanese and Liguria, and they spent a great portion of their time in composing and singing poetry.  One of them had a fine baritone voice; and when the sun had set, his comrades gathered round him and begged him to sing to them ’Con quella patetica tua voce.’  Then followed hours of singing, the low monotonous melodies of his ditties harmonising wonderfully with the tranquillity of night, so clear and calm that the sky and all its stars were mirrored on the sea, through which we moved as if in a dream.  Sometimes the songs provoked conversation, which, as is usual in Italy, turned mostly upon ‘le bellezze delle donne.’  I remember that once an animated discussion about the relative merits of blondes and brunettes nearly ended in a quarrel, when the youngest of the whole band, a boy of about seventeen, put a stop to the dispute by theatrically raising his eyes and arms to heaven and crying, ‘Tu sei innamorato d’ una grande Diana cacciatrice nera, ed io d’ una bella Venere bionda.’  Though they were but village lads, they supported their several opinions with arguments not unworthy of Firenzuola, and showed the greatest delicacy of feeling in the treatment of a subject which could scarcely have failed to reveal any latent coarseness.