Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886) Part 6

The folk-singer seldom paints foreign scenery in these glowing tints.

There may be something of a south-ward longing in the boast--

I'll show ye how the lilies grow On the banks o' Italie.

But this is cold and colourless beside the empire of the unsetting sun.

Next to the swallow, the grey gull has the reputation of being the greatest traveller. Till lately the women of Croisic met on a.s.sumption Day and sang a song to the gulls, imploring them to bring back their husbands and their lovers who were out at sea. Larks are often chosen as letter-carriers for short distances. The Greek knows that it is spring when pair by pair the turtle-doves swoop down to the brooks. He is an accurate observer; in April or May any retired English pool will be found flecked over with the down of the wood-pigeons that come to drink and bathe in it. The cooing of doves is by general consent a.s.sociated with constancy and requited love. It is not always, however, that nations are agreed as to the sense of a bird's song. The "merrie cuckoo" is supposed by the Sclavs to be rehearsing an endless dirge for a murdered brother. A Czech poet lays down yet another cause for its conjectured melancholy: "Perched upon an oak tree, a cuckoo weeps because it is not always spring. How could the rye ripen in the fields if it were always spring? How could the apples ripen in the orchard if it were always summer? How could the corn harden in the rick if it were always autumn?" In spite of the sagacious content shown by these inquiries, it is probable that the sadness which the Sclav attributes to the cuckoo-cry is but an echo of the sadness, deep and wide, of his own race.

Of the nightingale the Tuscan sings, in the spirit of one greater than he,--

Vedete la quel rusignol che canta Col s...o...b..l canto lamentar si vuole,--

which is not, by the by, his only Miltonic inspiration; there is a rustling of Vallombrosian leaves through the couplet, composed perhaps in Vallombrosia:

E quante primavera foglie adorna Che s vaga e gentile a noi ritorna.

The Bulgarian sees a mountain _trembling_ to the song of three nightingales. Like his Servian neighbours, he must always have a story, and here is his nightingale story. Marika went into the garden; she pa.s.sed the pomegranate-tree and the apple-tree, and sat her down under the red rose-tree to embroider a white handkerchief. In the rose-tree was a nightingale, and the nightingale said: "Let us sing, Marika; if you sing better than I, you shall cut off my wings at the shoulders and my feet at the knee; if I sing better than you, I will cut off your hair at the roots." They sang for two days, for three days; Marika sang the best. Then the nightingale pleaded, "Marika, fair young girl, do not cut off my feet, let me keep my wings, for I have three little nightingales to rear, and of one of them I will make you a gift." "Nightingale, sweet singer," said Marika, "I will give thee grace of thy wings, and even of thy feet; go, tend thy little ones, make me a gift of one to lull me to sleep, and of one to awake me."

We may take leave of bird-lays with the pretty old Bourbonnaise _chanson_:--

Derrier' chez nous, il y a-t-un vert bocage, Le rossignol y chant' tous les jours; La il y dit en son charmant langage: Les amoreux sont malheureux toujours!

Flowers, the green leaves and the gra.s.s, are suggestive of two kinds of pathos. The individual flower, the gra.s.s or leaf of any one day or spring-tide, becomes the type of the transitoriness of beauty and youth and life. "Sing whilst ye are young and fair, soon you will be slighted, as are sere lilies," is the song even of happy Tuscany. To the Sclav it seems a question whether it be worth while that there should be any flowers or morning gladness, since they must be gone so soon. "O my garden," sings the Ruthenian, "O my little garden, my garden and my green vine, why bloomest thou in the morning? Hardly bloomed, thou art withered, and the earth is strewn with thy leaves."

The other kind of pathos springs from a deeper well. Man pa.s.ses by, each one hurries to his tragedy; Nature smiles tranquilly on. This moving force of contrast was known to Lywarch Hen, and to those Keltic bards who dived so deep into Nature's secrets that scarcely a greater depth has been fathomed by any after-comers. It was perceived involuntarily by the English ballad-singers, who strung a burden of "Fine flowers" upon a tale of infanticide, and bade blackbird and mavis sing their sweetest between a murder and an execution. And it is this that gives its key-note to an Armenian popular song of singular power. A bishop tells how he has made himself a vineyard; he has brought stones from the valleys and raised a wall around it; he has planted young vines and plentifully has he watered their roots. Every morning the nightingale sings sweetly to the rose. Every morning Gabriel says to his soul: "Rise and come forth from this vineyard, from this newly-built vineyard." He has not eaten the fruit of the vine; he has built a wine-vat, but the wine he has not tasted; he has brought cool streams from the hills, but he has not drunk the water thereof; he has planted red and white roses, but he has not smelt their fragrance. The turtle-dove sings to the birds, and the spring is come. Gabriel calls to his soul, the light of his eyes grows dim; "It is time I leave my vineyard, my beautiful vineyard." There is hardly another poem treating of death which is so un-illuminated by one ray from a future dawn.

In the great ma.s.s of folk-songs flowers are dealt with simply as the accessories to all beautiful things. The folk-poet learns from them his alphabet of beauty. Go into any English cornfield after harvest; whilst the elder children glean wheat ears, the children of two and three years glean small yellow hearts-eases, vervaine, and blue scabious. They are as surely learning to distinguish the Beautiful as the student in the courts of the Vatican. Through life, when these children think of a beautiful thing, the thought of a flower will not be far off. Religion and love, after all the two chief embellishments of the life of the poor, have been hung about with flowers from the past of Persephone and Freya till to-day. Even in England the common people are glad if they can find a lily of the valley to carry to church at Whitsuntide, and the first sign that a country girl has got a sweetheart is often to be read in the transformation of the garden-plot before her door. In Italy you will not walk far among the vineyards and maize-fields without coming upon a shrine which bears traces of floral decoration. Some Italian villages and country towns have their special flower festival, or _Infiorata_; Genzano, for instance, where, on the eighth day after Corpus Domini, innumerable flowers are stripped of their petals, which are sorted out according to colour and then arranged in patterns on the way to the church, the magnificence of the effect going far to make one condone the heartlessness of immolating so many victims to achieve an hour's triumph. A charge of stupid indifference to beauty has been brought against the Italian peasant--it would seem partly on the score that he has been known to root up his anemones in order to put a stop to the inroads of foreign marauders. There are certain persons, law-abiding in the land which gave them birth, who when abroad, adopt the ethics of our tribal ancestors. A piece of ground, a tree, or a plant not enclosed by a wall, is turned by this strange public to its own uses.

A walnut tree by the wayside has a stick thrown among its branches to fetch down the walnuts. The peasant does what he can to protect himself. He observes that flowers attract trespa.s.sers, and so he roots up the flowers. There are Italian folk-songs which show a delight in flowers not to be surpa.s.sed anywhere. Flower-loving beyond all the rest are the Tuscan poets, whose love-lyrics have been truly described as "tutti seminati di fiori"--all sown with lilies, clove pinks, and jessamine. The fact fits in pleasantly with the legend of the first Florentines, who are said to have called their city after "the great basket of flowers" in which it was built. It fits in, too, with the sentiment attached even now to the very name of Florence. The old _Floraja_ in the overgrown straw hat at the railway station can reckon on something more abiding than her long-lost charms to find her patrons; and it is curious to note how few of the pa.s.sengers reject the proffered emblems of the flower town, or fail to earn the parting wish "Felice ritorno!"

One point may be granted; in Italy and elsewhere the common people do not highly or permanently value scentless flowers. A flower without fragrance is to them almost a dead flower. I put the question to a troop of English children coming from a wood laden with spoils, "What makes you like primroses?" "The scent of them," was the answer. A little further along the lane came another troop, and the question was repeated. This time the answer was, "Because they smell so nice."

No flower has been more widely reverenced than the una.s.suming sweet basil, the _Basilica odorato_ of Sicilian songs, the Tulasi plant of India, where it is well-nigh worshipped in the house of every pious Hindu. The scale is graduated thus: the flower which has no smell is plucked in play, but left remorselessly to wither as children leave their daisy chains; the flower which has a purely sweet and fresh perfume is arranged in nosegays, set in water, praised and enjoyed for the day; the flower which has a scent of spice and incense and aromatic gums bears off honours scarcely less than divine.

The folk-poet sings because heaven has given him a sweet voice and a fair mistress; because the earth brings forth her increase and the sun shines, and the spring comes back, and rest at noontide and at evening is lovely, and work in the oil-mill and in the vineyard is lovely too: he sings to embellish his labour and to enhance his repose. He lives on the shield of Achilles, singing, accompanied by a viol, to the grape-pickers; he is crowned with flowers in the golden age of Lucretius as he raises his sweet song at the _festa_. We have seen a little of what he says about Nature, but, in truth, he is still her interpreter when he says nothing. All folk-poesy is sung and folk-songs are as much one of Nature's voices as the song of the birds, the song of the brooks, the song of the wind in the pine-tops.

So it is likewise with the rude musical instruments which the exigencies of his life have taught the peasant how to make; they utter tones more closely in harmony with nature than those of the finest Stradivarius. The Greeks were right when they made Pan with his reed-pipe rather than Apollo with his lyre the typical Nature-G.o.d.

Anyone to whom it has chanced to hear a folk-song sung in its own home will understand what is meant. You may travel a good deal and not have that chance. The songs, the customs, the traditions of the people form an arcanum of which they are not always ready to lift the veil. To those, of course, whose lives are cast among a people that still sings, the opportunity comes oftener. But if the song be sung consciously for your pleasure its soul will hardly remain in it. I shall always vividly remember two occasions of hearing a folk-song sung. Once, long ago, on the Bida.s.soa. The day was closing in; the bell was tolling in the little chapel on the heathery mountain-side, where ma.s.s is said for the peace of the brave men who fell there.

Fontarabia stood bathed in orange light. It was low water, and the boat got almost stranded; then the boatmen, an older and a younger man, both built like athletes, began to sing in low, wild s.n.a.t.c.hes for the tide. Once, not very long since, at the marble quarry of Sant'

Ambrogio. Here also it was towards evening and in the autumn. The vintage was half over; all day the sweet "Prenda! Prenda!" of the grape-gatherers had invited the stranger to share in its purple magnificence. The blue of the more distant Veronese hills deepened against a coralline sky; not a dark thing was in sight except here or there the silhouette of a cypress. Only a few workmen were employed in the quarry; one, a tall, slight lad, sang in the intervals from labour an air full of pa.s.sion and tenderness. The marble amphitheatre gave sonority to his high voice. Each time Nature would have seemed incomplete had it lacked the human song.

ARMENIAN FOLK-SONGS.

Obscure in their origin, and for the most part having at first had no such auxiliary as written record to aid their preservation, the single fact of the existence of folk-songs may in general suffice to proclaim them the true articulate voice of some sentiment or feeling, common to the large bulk of the people whence they emanate. It is plain that the fittest only can survive--only such as are truly germane to those who say or sing them. A herdsman or tiller of the soil strings together a few verses embodying some simple thought which came into his head whilst he looked at the green fields or the blue skies, or it may be as he acted in a humble way as village poet-laureate. One or two friends get them by heart, and possibly sing them at the fair in the next hamlet: if they hit, others catch them up, and so the song travels for miles and miles, and may live out generations. If not, the effusion of our poetical cowherd dies away quite silently--not much to his distress, for had its fate been more propitious its author would probably have been very little the wiser. One celebrated poet, and I think but one, has in our own times begun his career in like manner with the unknown folk-singer. The songs of Sandor Petofi were popular over the breadth of the Hungarian Puszta before ever they appeared in print; and those who know him, know how faithfully he breathes forth the soul of the Magyar race. In a certain sense it is true that every real poet is the spokesman of his people. No two works, for instance, are so characteristic of their respective countries as the _Divina Commedia_ and _Faust_. Still, the hands of genius idealise what they touch; the great poet personifies rather than reflects his people, and if he serves them as representative, it is in an august, imperial fashion within the Senate House of Fame, outside whose doors the mult.i.tude hustles and seethes. When we want to see this mult.i.tude as in a mirror, to judge its common instincts and impulses that go very far to cast the nation in the type which makes it what it is, it is a safer and surer plan to search out its own spontaneous and untutored songs than to consult the master work attached to immortal names.

How far the individuality of a race is decided or modified by the natural phenomena in which it is placed is a nice point for discussion, and one not to be disposed of by off-hand generalities.

In what consists the sympathetic link, sometimes weak and scarcely perceptible, at others visibly strong, between man and nature?

Why does the emigrated mountaineer, settled in comfort, ease, and prosperity in some great metropolis, wake up one day with the knowledge that he must begone to the wooden chalet with the threat of the avalanche above and the menace of the flood below--or he must die?

Is it force of early a.s.sociation, habit, or fancy? Why is the wearied town-tied brain-worker sensible of a nostalgia hardly less poignant when he calls to mind how the fires of day kindled across some scene of snow or sea with which his eyes were once familiar? Is it nothing more than the return of a long ago experienced admiration? I think that neither physicist nor psychologist--and both have a right to be heard in the matter--would answer that the cause of these sensations was to be thus shortly defined. Again ask the artist what the Athenian owed to the purity and proportion of the lines of Grecian landscape, what the Italian stole from the glow and glory of meridional light and colour--what the Teuton learnt from the ascending spires of Alpine ice? Was it that they saw and copied? Or rather, that Nature's spirit, vibrating through the pulses of their being, moulded into form the half-divine visions of master-sculptor, painter, architect?

It does not, however, require to go deeper than the surface of things in order to understand that a peoples' songs must be largely influenced by the accidents of natural phenomena, and especially where climate and physical conformation are such as must perforce stir and stimulate the imaginative faculties of the ma.s.ses. We have an instance to the point in the ballads of the "mountainous island" bounded by seas and plains, which the natives call Hayasdan and we Armenia. The wondering emotion aroused by a first descent from the Alps into Italy is well known; to not a few of the mightiest of northern poets this journey has acted like a charm, a revelation, an awakening to fuller consciousness. In Armenia, the incantation of a like natural ant.i.thesis is worked by the advent of its every returning spring: a sluggard of a season that sleeps on soundly till near midsummer, but comes forth at last fully clothed in the gorgeous raiment of a king.

In days gone by the Armenian spring was dedicated to the G.o.ddess Anahid, and as it broke over the land the whole people joined in joyful celebration of the feast of Varthavar or "Rose-blossoms,"

which since Christian times has been transformed into the three days'

festival of the Transfiguration. Beautiful is the face of the country when the tardy sun begins to make up for lost time, as though his very life depended on it; shooting down his beams with fiery force through the rarefied ether, melting away the snows, and ripening all at once the grain and grapes, the wild fig, apricot and olive, mulberry and pomegranate. What wonder that the Armenian loves the revivifying lamp of day, that he turns the dying man towards it, and will not willingly commit his dead to the earth if some bright rays do not fall into the open grave! At the sun's reveille there is a general resurrection of all the buried winter population--women and children, cows and sheep, pink-eyed lemmings, black-eyed caraguz, and little kangaroo-shaped jerboas. Out, too, from their winter lairs come wolf and bear, hyena and tiger, leopard and wild boar. The stork returns to his nest on the broad chimney-pot, and this is what the peasant tells him of all that has happened in his absence:

Welcome, Stork!

Thou Stork, welcome; Thou hast brought us the sign of spring, Thou hast made our heart gay.

Descend, O Stork!

Descend, O Stork, upon our roof, Make thy nest upon our ash-tree.

I will tell thee my thousand sorrows, The sorrows of my heart, the thousand sorrows, Stork, when thou didst go away, When thou didst go away from our tree, Withering winds did blow, They dried up our smiling flowers.

The brilliant sky was obscured, That brilliant sky was cloudy: From above they were breaking the snow in pieces: Winter approached, the destroyer of flowers.

Beginning from the rock of Varac, Beginning from that rock of Varac, The snow descended and covered all; In our green meadow it was cold.

Stork, our little garden, Our little garden was surrounded with snow; Our green rose trees Withered with the snow and the cold.

But now the rose trees in the garden are green again, and out abroad wild flowers enamel the earth. Down pour the torrents of melted snow off Mount Ararat, down crash the avalanches of ice and stones let loose by the sun's might; wherever an inch of soil or rock is uncovered it becomes a carpet of blossom. High up, even to 13,000 feet above the sea-level, the deep violet aster, the saxifrage, and crocus, and ranunculus, and all our old Alpine acquaintances, form a dainty morsel for the teeth, or a carpet for the foot, of swift capricorn or not less agile wild sheep. A little lower, amidst patches of yet frozen snow, hyacinths scent the air, yellow squills and blue anemones peep out, clumps of golden iris cl.u.s.ter between the rocks. There, too, is the "Fountain's Blood," or "Blood of the Seven Brothers," as the Turk would say, with its crimson, leafless stalk and lily-like bloom, the reddest of all red flowers. Upon the trees comes the sweet white _kasbe_, a kind of manna much relished by the inhabitants. Amongst the gra.s.s grow the Stars of Bethlehem, to remind us, as tradition has it, that hard by on Ararat--beyond question the great centre of Chaldean Star-worship--the wise men were appointed to watch for the appearance of a sign in the heavens, and that thence they started in quest of the place "where the young child lay." Tulips also abound; if we may credit the legend, they had their origin in the Armenian town of Erzeroom, springing from the life-blood of Ferdad when he threw himself from the rocks in despair at a false alarm of the death of his beloved Shireen.

Erzeroom is by common consent in these parts the very site of the Garden of Eden. For many centuries, affirms the Moslem, the flowers of Paradise might yet be seen blossoming round the source of the Euphrates not far from the town. But, alas! when the great Persian King Khosref Purveez, the rival of the above-mentioned Ferdad, was encamped in that neighbourhood, he was rash enough to spurn a message from the young Prophet Mohammed, offering him protection if he would embrace the faith of Islam. What booted the protection of an insignificant sectary to him? thought the Shah-in-Shah, and tossed the letter into the Euphrates. But Nature, horrified at the sacrilegious deed, dried up her flowers and fruits, and even parched the sources of the river itself; the last relic of Eden became a waste. There is a plaintive Armenian elegy composed in the person of Adam sitting at the gate of Paradise, and beholding Cherubim and Seraphim entering the Garden of which he once was king, "yea, like unto a powerful king!"

The poet puts into Adam's mouth a new line of defence; he did not eat of the fruit, he says, until after he had witnessed its fatal effects upon Eve, when, seeing her despoiled of all her glory, he was touched with pity, and tasted the immortal fruit in the hope that the Creator contemplating them both in the same wretched plight might with paternal love take compa.s.sion on both. But vain was the hope; "the Lord cursed the serpent and Eve, and I was enslaved between them." "O Seraphim!" cries the exiled father of mankind:

When ye enter Eden, shut not the gate of Paradise; place me standing at the gate; I will look in a moment, and then bring me back.

Ah! I remember ye, O flowers and sweet-swelling fountains. Ah!

I remember ye O birds, sweet-singing--and ye, O beasts:

Ye who enjoy Paradise, come and weep over your king; ye who are in Paradise planted by G.o.d, elected from the earth of every kind and sort.

High above the hardiest saxifrage tower the three thousand feet of everlasting snows that crown Mount Ararat. The Armenians call it Ma.s.sis or "Mother of the World," and old geographers held that it was the centre of the earth, an hypothesis supported by various ingenious calculations. The Persians have their own set of legends about it; they say that Ararat was the cradle of the human race, and that at one time it afforded pasture up to the apex of its dome; but upon man's expulsion from Eden, Ahriman the serpent doomed the whole country to a ten months' winter. As to the semi-scriptural traditions gathered round the mountain, there is no end to them. "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat," so says the Bible, and it is an article of faith with the Armenian peasant that it is still somewhere up at the top, only not visible. He is extremely loth to believe that anybody has actually attained the summit. Parrot's famous ascent was long regarded as the merest fable. At the foot of Ararat was a village named Argoory, or "he planted the vine," where Noah's vineyard is pointed out to this day, though the village itself was destroyed in 1840, when the mountain woke up from its long slumbers and rolled down its side a stream of boiling lava; but we are told that, owing to the sins of the world, the vines no longer bear fruit. Close at hand is Manard, "the mother lies here," alluding to the burial-place of Noah's wife, and yonder is Eravan or "Visible," the first dry land which Noah perceived as the waters receded. Armenian choniclers relate that when after leaving the ark the descendants of Noah dispersed to different quarters, one amongst them, by name Haig, the great-grandson of j.a.phet, settled with his family in Mesopotamia, where he probably took part in the building of the Tower of Babel. Later, however, upon Belus acquiring dominion over the land, Haig found his rule so irksome to himself and his clan that they migrated back in a body of 300 persons to Armenia, much to the displeasure of Belus, who summoned them to return, and when they refused, despatched a large army to coerce them into obedience. Haig collected his men on the sh.o.r.es of Van, and thus sagaciously addressed them:

When we meet with the army of Belus, let us attempt to draw near where he lies surrounded by his warriors; either we shall be killed, and our camp equipments and baggage will fall into his hands, or, making a show of the strength of our arm, we shall defeat his army, and victory will be ours.

These tactics proved completely successful, and Belus fell mortally wounded by an arrow from Haig's bow. Having in this way disposed of his enemies, the patriarch was able before he died to consolidate Hayasdan into a goodly kingdom, which he left to the authority of his son Armenag.

After the reign of Haig the thread of Armenian annals continues without break or hitch; it must be admitted that no people, not even the Jews, boast a history which "begins with the beginning" in a more thorough way, nor does the work of any chronicler proceed in a more methodical and circ.u.mstantial manner than that of Moses of Kh.o.r.en, the Herodotus of Armenia. As is well known, Moses, writing in the fifth century, founded his chronicle upon a work undertaken about five hundred years before by one Marabas Cattina, a Syrian, at the request of the great Armenian monarch Vagshais.h.a.g. Marabas stated that his record was based upon a ma.n.u.script he had discovered in the archives of Nineveh which bore the indors.e.m.e.nt, "This book, containing the annals of ancient history, was translated from the Chaldean into Greek, by order of Alexander the Great." Whatever may be the precise amount of credence to which the Chronicle of Moses is ent.i.tled, all will agree that it narrates the story of a high-spirited and intelligent people whom the alternating domination of Greek and Persian could not cower into relinquishing the substance of their liberties, and whose efforts, in the main successful, on behalf of their cherished independence, were never more vigorous than at times when their triumph seemed farthest off. For nearly a thousand years after the date of Moses of Kh.o.r.en, his people maintained their autonomy, and whether we look before or after the flight of the last Armenian king before the soldiers of the Crescent, we must acknowledge that few nations have fought more valiantly for their political rights, whilst yet fewer have suffered more severely for their fidelity to their faith. It is the pride of the Armenians that theirs was the first country which adopted the Christian religion; it may well be their pride also, that they kept their Christianity in the teeth of persecutions which can only find a parallel in those undergone by the Hebrew race.

Armenia is naturally rich in early Christian legends, of which the most curious is perhaps that of the correspondence alleged to have occurred between Our Lord and Abgar, king of Hayasdan. The latter, it is said, having sent messengers to transact some business with the Roman generals quartered in Palestine, received on their return such accounts of the miracles performed by Jesus of Nazareth as convinced him either that Christ was G.o.d come down upon the earth, or that he was the son of G.o.d. Suffering from a grave malady, and hearing, moreover, that the Jews had set their hearts on doing despite to the Prophet who had risen in their midst, Abgar wrote a letter beseeching Christ to come to his capital and cure him of his sickness. "My city is indeed small," this letter navely concludes, "but it is sufficient to contain us both." The king also sent a painter to Jerusalem, so that if Our Lord could not come to Edessa he might at least possess his portrait. The painter was one day endeavouring to fulfil his mission when he was observed by Christ, who pa.s.sing a handkerchief over his face, gave it to the Armenian impressed with the likeness of his features. The response to Abgar's letter was written by St Thomas, who said, on behalf of his Divine Master, that his work lay elsewhere than in Armenia, but that after his Ascension he would send an Apostle to enlighten the people of that country. This correspondence, though now not accepted as authentic out of Armenia, was mentioned by some of the earliest Church historians, and it is a.s.serted that one of the letters has been found written on papyrus in an Egyptian tomb.

Christianity seems to have made some way in Armenia in the second century, but to what extent is unknown. What is certain is, that in the third century, St Gregory the Illuminator, after having been tortured in twelve different ways by King Tiridates for refusing to worship the G.o.ddess Anahid, and kept at the bottom of a well for fourteen years, was taken out of it in consequence of a vision of the king's sister, and converted that monarch and all his subjects along with him. St Gregory is held in boundless reverence by the Armenians; he is almost looked upon as a divine viceroy, as will be seen from the following canzonette which Armenian children are taught to sing:

The light appears, the light appears!

The light is good: The sparrow is on the tree, The hen is on the perch, The sleep of lazy men is a year, Workman, rise and begin thy work!

The gates of heaven are opened, The throne of gold is erected, Christ is sitting on it; The Illuminator is standing, He has taken the golden pen, He has written great and small.

Sinners are weeping, The just are rejoicing.

The poet of the people nowhere occupies himself with casting about for a fine subject; he writes of what he feels and of what he sees.

The Armenian peasant sees the snow in winter; in summer he sees the flowers and the birds--only birds and flowers are to him the pleasanter sight, so he sings more about them. He rarely composes any verse without a flower or a bird being mentioned in it; all his similes are ornithological or botanical, and by them he expresses the tenderest emotions of his heart. There is a pathos, a simplicity really exquisite in the conception of some of these little bird-and-flower pieces, as, for example, in the subjoined "Lament of a Mother" over her dead babe:

I gaze and weep, mother of my boy, I say alas and woe is me wretched!

What will become of wretched me, I have seen my golden son dead!

They seized that fragrant rose Of my breast, and my soul fainted away; They let my beautiful golden dove Fly away, and my heart was wounded.