’Is it not nice the jewel looked at the races and at the church in Barna?  She took the sway there as far as the big town.  Is she not the nice flower with the white breast, the comeliness of a woman? and the sun of summer pleased with her, shining on her at every side, and hundreds of men in love with her.

     ’It is I would like to run through the hills with her, and to go
     the roads with her; and it is I would put a cloak around my Nora
     Ban.’

The very naivete, the simplicity of these ballads, make one feel that the peasants who make and sing them may be trembling on the edge of a great discovery; and that some day—­perhaps very soon—­one born among them will put their half-articulate, eternal sorrows and laments and yearnings into words that will be their expression for ever, as was done for the Hebrew people when the sorrow of exile was put into the hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, and the sorrow of death into the lament for Saul and Jonathan, and the yearning of love into what was once known as ‘the ballad of ballads,’ the Song of Solomon.

I have one ballad at least to give, that shows, even in my prose translation, how near that day may be, if the language that holds the soul of our West Irish people can be saved from the ‘West Briton’ destroyer.  There are some verses in it that attain to the intensity of great poetry, though I think less by the creation of one than by the selection of many minds; the peasants who have sung or recited their songs from one generation to another, having instinctively sifted away by degrees what was trivial, and kept only what was real, for it is in this way the foundations of literature are laid.  I first heard of this ballad from the South; but when I showed it to an Aran man, he said it was well known there, and that his mother had often sung it to him when he was a child.  It is called ’The Grief of a Girl’s Heart’:—­

’O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and do not forget it; and you will have a sweetheart for fair days and market days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at night.

’It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.  It is you are the lonely bird through the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

’You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

     ’You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold
     under a silver mast; twelve towns with a market in all of them, and
     a fine white court by the side of the sea.

     ’You promised me a thing that is not possible, that you would give
     me gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of
     the skin of a bird; and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.