when he finds 'isself jilted an' his young ooman gone off wi' another party. He'll not crow quite so loud then, eh, sir, what d'you think?" "I think he has certainly cause for jealousy at present, and that I must be going on. Good-day to you, friend," said the stranger; but though he suited the action to the word, he paused before he had gone many steps, and again looked after the two figures, now barely visible in the distance, with gravely thoughtful eyes. "After all," he said to himself, "it was for these girls and their selfish, cruel mother that my poor hapless darling was cast upon the world. Why should I interfere to save her? I only wish it were not Helen's brother. I suppose it is retributive. But she must be a fickle, goodfor-nothing girl anyhow." Some other people began to say the same of poor Sybil about then. Of all places in the world where it is impossible to keep anything, however trifling, to yourself, and where scandal is the staple food and daily delight, give me a country village within easy reach of London; and perhaps old Jowl's intimacy with "the servant gal" community was prejudicial to Miss Dysart in more houses than people who don't listen to back-stairs gossip could easily believe. Perhaps, too, Mrs. Jacobson had been imprudent in jesting about Mr. Vane's passion for his "lily maid." She let her tongue run on about it somewhat freely at the De Boonyens' one day; and Mrs. de Boonyen listened greedily, and next day drove off in state, bearing Horatia Maude with her, to call at Dilworth Rectory, where, having veiled her triumph under a grave show of commiseration, she dropped so many hints about the deplorable laxity and imprudence of " "some young ladies, and about Mrs. Dysart's way of bringing up girls never having been the same as hers, that when she was gone, the rector's wife indulged in one of the heartiest laughs she had enjoyed for some time, and told her husband that Lion ought to be vain. and on that' air which was almost pathetic and Hamlet-like." At that moment Jenny Dysart was putting the finishing touches to the dress Sybil was to wear at a party they were both going to that night at Squire Chawler's. Their mother was not able to go with them; but Mrs. Chawler had promised to chaperon the girls herself if they were allowed to come; and as the dance was being partly given as a farewell to Lionel's bachelorhood, it would have been churlish to refuse; but while Sybil stood by watching her sister's nimble fingers as they draped a fold here, or inserted a flower there, there was an unwonted cloud on her brow, and a brilliancy in her eyes which she could not dispel. Only the previous day she had met Mrs. Jacobson, who had told her that she was going to the party and was taking Gareth with her, and her heart beat fast even now as she thought of it. It beat faster still when she entered Mrs. Chawler's drawing-room some three hours later, and saw Gareth leaning against a doorway; not dancing, but with a wearied, impatient expression, as if he were waiting for some one. She was glad that the joint greetings of her hostess and Lion obliged her to look away; but, through them all, she felt that he had seen her, and was only waiting till she was free. From Fraser's Magazine. FOLK LULLABIES. A nurse's song We Of lullaby, to bring her babe asleep. INFANCY is a great mystery. know that we each have gone over that stage in human life, though even this much is not always quite easy to realize. But what else do we know about it? Something by observation, something by intuition; by experience hardly anything at all. We have as much personal acquaintance with a lake-dwelling or stoneage infant as with our proper selves at Fancy, those dear De Boonyens the time when we were passing through haven't given up all hopes of him yet; I the avatar of babyhood. The recollecsuppose it is that devoted mother's last tions of our earliest years are at most effort before his marriage, poor fellow; only as the confused remembrance of a but she positively brought her unfortunate morning dream, which at one end fades little girl here to-day decked out in all her into the unconsciousness of sleep, whilst smartest clothes and looking more misera- at the other it mingles with the realities ble and hideous than usual; and sat abus- of awaking. And yet, as a fact, we did ing our Hillbrow girls and gazing at her not sleep through all the dawn of our own offspring with a Look on this picture | life, nor were we unconscious only we 66 · tered language of the cultivated classes changes; the spoken tongue of the uneducated remains the same; or, if it too undergoes a process of change, the rate at which it moves is to the other what the pace of a tortoise is to the speed of an express train. About eight hundred years ago a handful of Lombards went to Sicily, where they still preserve the Lom were different from what we now are: the term "thinking animal" did not then fit us so well. We were less reasonable and less material. Babies have a way of looking at you that makes you half suspect they belong to a separate order of beings. You speculate as to whether they have not invisible wings, which drop off afterwards as do the birth wings of the young ant. There is one thing, how-bard idiom. The Ober-Engadiner could ever, in which the baby is very human, very manlike. Of all new-born creatures he is the least happy. You may sometimes see a little child crying softly to himself with a look of world woe on his face that is positively appalling. Perhaps human existence, like a new pair of shoes, is very uncomfortable till one gets accustomed to it. Anyhow the child, being for some reason or reasons exceedingly disposed to vex its heart, needs much soothing. In this highly civilized country a good many mothers are in the habit of going to the nearest druggist for the means to tranquillize their offspring, with the result that these latter are not unfrequently rescued from the sea of sorrows in the most final and expeditious way. In less advanced states of society another expedient has been resorted to from time immemorial- to wit, the cradle song. Babies show an early appreciation of rhythm. They rejoice in measured noise, whether it takes the form of words, music, or the jingle of a bunch of keys. In the way of poetry we are afraid they must be admitted to have a perverse preference for what goes by the name of sing-song. It will be a long time before the infantine public are brought round to Walt Whitman's views on versification. For the rest, they are not very severe critics. The small ancient Roman asked for nothing better than the song of his nurse, Lalla, lalla, lalla, Aut dormi, aut lacta. hold converse with his remote ancestors who took refuge in the Alps three or four centuries before Christ; the Aragonese colony at Alghero, in Sardinia, yet discourses in Catalan; the Roumanian language still contains terms and expressions which, though dissimilar to both Latin and standard Italian, find their analogues in the dialects of those eastward-facing "Latin plains" whence, in all probability, the people of Roumania sprang. But we must return to our lullabies. There exists another Latin cradle song, not indeed dating from classical times, but which, like the laconic effusion of the Roman nurse, forms a sort of landmark in the history of poetry. It is composed in the person of the Virgin Mary, and was in bygone days believed to have been actually sung by her. Good authorities pronounce it to be one of the earliest poems extant of the Christian era. Dormi fili, dormi ! mater Nato clamat parvulo: Dormi, cor, et meus thronus; Si vis musicam, pastores Convocabo protinus; Nemo canit castius. This two-line lullaby constitutes one of the few but sufficing proofs which have come down to us of the existence among the people of old Rome of a sort of folk verse not by any means resembling the Latin classics, but bearing a considerable likeness to the canti popolari of the modern Italian peasant. It may be said parenthetically that the study of dialect Everybody who is in Rome at Christtends altogether to the conviction that mas-tide makes a point of visiting Santa there are country people now living in Maria in Ara Coeli, the church which Italy to whom, rather than to Cicero, we stands to the right of the Capitol, where should go if we want to know what style once the temple of Jupiter Feretrius is of speech was in use among the hum- supposed to have stood. What is at that bler subjects of the Cæsars. The let-season to be seen in the Ara Cœli is well enough known to one side a presepio, or manger, with the ass, the ox, St. Joseph, the Virgin, and the child on her knee; to the other side a throng of little Roman children rehearsing in their infantine voices the story that is pictured opposite. The scene may be taken as typical of the cult of the infant Saviour, which, under one form or another, has existed distinct and separable from the main stem of Christian worship ever since a voice in Judæa bade man seek after the divine in the stable of Bethlehem. It is almost a commonplace to say that Christianity brought fresh and peculiar glory alike to infancy and to motherhood. A new sense came into the words of the oracle,— Thee in all children, the eternal Child. And the mother, sublimely though she appears against the horizon of antiquity, yet rose to a higher rank — because the highest at the founding of the new faith. Especially in art she left the second place that she might take the first. The sentiment of maternal love, as illustrated, as transfigured, in the love of the Virgin for her divine child, furnished the great Italian painters with their master motif, whilst in his humble fashion the obscure folk poet exemplifies the selfsame thought. We are not sure that the rude rhymes of which the following is a rendering do not convey, as well as can be conveyed in articulate speech, the glory and the grief of the Dresden Madonna. Lullaby, my Spouse, my Lord, Lo! the shepherd band draws nigh; Thee their King to glorify. Lullaby, my soul's Delight; Thee with cruel death would smite. Sleep, sleep, Thou who dost heaven impart ; Sleep as I press Thee to my heart. It would be interesting to know if Mrs. Browning ever heard any one of the many variants of this lullaby before writing her poem "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus." The version given above was communicated to us by a resident at Vallauria, in the heart of the Ligurian Alps. In that district it is sung in the churches on Christmas Eve, when out abroad the mountains sleep soundly in their snows and a stray wolf is not an impossible apparition, nothing reminding you that you are within a day's journey of the citron groves of Mentone. An old English carol, current in the time of Henry IV., has much affinity with the Italian sacred cradle songs, Lullay! lullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere fode; How xalt thou sufferin be naylid on the rode. In Sicily there are a great number of pious lullabies of a lighter and less serious sort. The Sicilian poet relates how once, when the Madunazza was mending St. Joseph's clothes, the Bambineddu cried in his cradle because no one was attending to him; so the archangel Raphael came down and rocked him, and said three sweet little words to him, “Lullaby, Jesus, Son of Mary!" Another time, when the child was older and the mother was going to visit St. Anne, he wept because he wished to go too. The mother let him accompany her on condition that he would not break St. Anne's bobbins. Yet another time the Virgin went to the fair to buy flax, and the child said that he too would like to have a fairing. The Virgin buys him a tambourine, and angels descend to listen to his playing. Such stories are endless; some, no doubt, are invented on the spur of the moment, but The lady good St. Anna, The lord St. Joachim, The Son of God is near. When they are old enough to understand the meaning of words children are sure to be interested up to a certain point by these saintly fables, but, taken as a whole, the songs of the south give us the impression that the coming of Christmas kindles the imagination of the southern mother rather than that of the southern child. On the north side of the Alps it is otherwise; there is scarcely need to say that in the Vaterland Christmas is before all the children's feast. We, who have borrowed many of the German Yule-tide customs, have left out the Christkind; and it is well that we have done so. Transplanted to foreign soil, that poetic piece of extra-belief would have become a mockery. As soon try to naturalize Kolyada, the Sclavonic white-robed New-year girl. The Christkind in his mythical attributes is nearer to Kolyada than to the Italian Bambinello. He belongs to the people, not to the Church. He is not swathed in jewelled swaddling clothes; his limbs are free, and he has wings that carry him wheresoever good children abide. There is about him all the dreamy charm of lands where twilight is long and shade and shine intermingle softly, and where the earth's wintry winding-sheet is more beautiful than her April bride-gown. The most popular of German lullabies is a truly Teutonic mixture of piety, wonderlore, and homeliness. Wagner has introduced the music to which it is sung into his "Siegfried-Idyll." We have to thank a Heidelberg friend for the text. Sleep, baby, sleep: Your father tends the sheep; Your mother shakes the branches small, Whence happy dreams in showers fall: Sleep, baby, sleep. Sleep, baby, sleep: The stars the lambs of heaven are, Sleep, baby, sleep: He is Himself the Lamb of God; The world to save, to death He trod : Sleep, baby, sleep. In Denmark children are sung to sleep with a cradle hymn which is believed (so we are informed by a youthful correspondent) to be "very old." It has seven stanzas, of which the first runs, "Sleep sweetly, little child; lie quiet and still; as sweetly sleep as the bird in the wood, as the flowers in the meadow. God the Father has said, 'Angels stand on watch where mine, the little ones, are in bed."" A correspondent at Warsaw (still more youthful) sends us the even-song of Polish children. The stars shine forth from the blue sky; How great and wondrous is God's might! Shine, stars, through all eternity, His witness in the night. O Lord, Thy tired children keep; Keep us who know and feel thy might; Turn thine eye on us as we sleep, And give us all good-night. Shine, stars, God's sentinels on high, Ó stars, good-night, good-night! Is this "Dobra Noc" of strictly popu lar origin? From internal evidence we should say that it is not. It seems, however, to be extremely popular in the ordinary sense of the word. Before us lie two or three settings of it by Polish musicians. The Italians call lullabies ninne-nanne, a term used by Dante when he makes Forese predict the ills which are to overtake the dames of Florence. E se l'anteveder qui non m' inganna, Prima fien triste che le guance impeli Some etymologists have sought to connect nanna with nenia or viros, but its most apparent relationship is with vavvapioμara, the modern Greek name for cradle songs, which is derived from a root three; Until I call beguile this child for me. root, My cradled hope, my spirit's strength and stay; signifying the singing of a child to sleep. | Keep him three hours, and keep him moments The ninne-nanne of the various Italian provinces are to be found scattered here and there through volumes of folk poesy, and no attempt has yet been made to collate and compare them. Signor Dal Medico did indeed publish, some ten years ago, a separate collection of Venetian nursery rhymes, but his initiative has not been followed up. The difficulty we have had in obtaining the little work just mentioned is characteristic of the way in which Italian printed matter vanishes out of all being; instead of passing into the obscure but secure limbo into which much of our own literature enters, it attains nothing short of nirvāna—a happy state of non-existence. The inquiries of several Italian booksellers led to no other conclusion than that the book in question was not to be had for love or money; and most likely we should still have been waiting for it were it not for the courtesy of the Baron Giovanni di Sardagna, who, on hearing that it was wanted by an English student of folk lore, borrowed from the author the only copy in his possession and made therefrom a verbatim transcript. The following is one of Signor Dal Medico's lullabies: Hush! lulla, lullaby! So mother sings; Her little loving mouth St. Martha gave. Now tell me where love springs, and how doth With music and with song doth love arise, The question and answer as to the beginning and end of love run through all the songs of Italy, and in nearly every case the reply proceeds from Florence. The personality of the answerer changes; sometimes it is a little wild bird; on one occasion it is a preacher. And the idea has been suggested that the last is the original form, and that the preacher of Florence who preaches against love is none other than Jeronimo Savonarola. Another of Signor Dal Medico's ninnenanne presents several points of interest. O Sleep, O Sleep, O thou beguiler, Sleep, Now, in the first place, the comparison of the child's gradual falling asleep with the slow ignition of fresh-cut wood is the common property of all the populations whose ethnical centre of gravity lies in Venice. We have seen an Istriot version of it, and we have heard it sung by a countrywoman at San Martino di Castrozza in the Trentino; so that, at all events, Italia redenta and irredenta has a community of song. The second thing that calls for remark is the direct invocation of sleep. A distinct little group of cradle ditties displays this characteristic. Come, sleep," cries the Grecian mother, 66 66 come, sleep, take him away; come, sleep, and make him slumber. Carry him to the vineyard of the Aga, to the gardens of the Aga. The Aga will give him grapes; his wife, roses; his servant, pancakes." A second Greek lullaby must have sprung from a luxuriant imagination. It comes from Schio: |