ische Sprachlehre_, Luebben 1761. _Kurze Anleitung zur
Wend. Sprache_, 1746. Megiseri _Thesaurus Polyglottus_, Frankf. 1603;
including the Lower Lusatian. Several vocabularies of this dialect are
extant in manuscript; see Schaffarik's _Geschichte_, p. 486.]

* * * * *

PART IV.

SKETCH OF THE POPULAR POETRY OF THE SLAVIC NATIONS.

In the preceding view of the literature of the Slavic nations, we have
abstained from giving any specimens of their poetry. A _few_ would not
have satisfied the reader, and could not have done justice to poets,
who each for himself has a literary character of his own; and _many_
would have at least doubled the size of this volume. Shukovsky,
Pushkin, Mickewicz, Brodzinski, Krasinski, Kollar--each, as we said,
has an individual poetical character of his own, of which the reader
could have gathered no just idea without a whole series of their
productions; and these even then would have lost half their value in a
translation. Yet they all have little of that peculiar _Slavic_
character, which belongs still in some degree to all Slavic nations;
and which is so strikingly expressed in their POPULAR POETRY.

Our remark respecting the loss of the principal charms which all
poetical productions have to undergo, when clothed in a foreign dress,
applies as well to popular poetry as to the works of literature, and
even more. Indeed, if any kind of poetry must needs lose half its
beauties in a translation, the truth of the Latin saying, _Dulcius ex
ipsa fonte bibuntur aguae_, will never be more readily acknowledged,
than in respect to the idiomatic peculiarities of popular ballads.
This holds good principally of merely lyric productions, the only kind
of songs which are left to some of the Slavic tribes. They are grown
into the very bone and marrow of the language itself; and a congenial
spirit can at the utmost imitate, but never satisfactorily translate
them. And yet they are the most essential features in the physiognomy
of a people; or, as Goerres expresses it, they are like pulse and
breath, the signs and the measure of the internal life. "While the
great _epic_ streams," as this ingenious writer justly says, "reflect
the character of a whole wide-spread river-district, in time and
history, these lyric effusions are the sources and fountains, which,
with their net-work of rills, water and drain the whole country; and,
bringing to light the secrets of its in