The ballads are prevailingly tragical in theme, and the tragic passions of pity and fear find an elementary force of utterance.  Love is strong as death, jealousy cruel as the grave.  Hate, shame, grief, despair speak here with their native accent: 

    “There are seven forsters at Pickeram Side,
      At Pickeram where they dwell,
    And for a drop of thy heart’s bluid
      They wad ride the fords of hell."[28]

    “O little did my mother think,
      The day she cradled me,
    What lands I was to travel through,
      What death I was to dee."[29]

The maiden asks her buried lover: 

    “Is there any room at your head, Sanders? 
      Is there any room at your feet? 
    Or any room at your twa sides,
      Where fain, fain would I sleep?"[30]

    “O waly, waly, but love be bonny
      A little time while it is new;[31]
    But when ’tis auld it waxeth cauld
      And fades awa’ like morning dew. . .

    “And O! if my young babe were born,
      And set upon the nurse’s knee,
    And I mysel’ were dead and gane,
      And the green grass growing over me!”

Manners in this world are of a primitive savagery.  There are treachery, violence, cruelty, revenge; but there are also honor, courage, fidelity, and devotion that endureth to the end.  “Child Waters” and “Fair Annie” do not suffer on a comparison with Tennyson’s “Enid” and Chaucer’s story of patient Griselda ("The Clerkes Tale”) with which they have a common theme.  It is the medieval world.  Marauders, pilgrims, and wandering gleemen go about in it.  The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over moss and moor.  Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land “by the hie light o’ the moon.”  Monks are chanting in St. Mary’s Kirk, trumpets are blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is an ambush and swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the greenwood; four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, and four and twenty milk-white calves are in the woods of Glentanner—­all ready to be stolen.  About Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the castle-wall, the palmer returns from the Holy Land, Young Waters lies deep in Stirling dungeon, but Child Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow locks with a silver comb.

There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle.  This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the popular fancy which created him.  For though the names of his confessor, Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John, Scathelock, and Much the miller’s son, have an air of reality,—­and though the tradition has associated itself with definite localities,—­there