ckoo in the forest cool doth sing,
Not in the gardens sings a nightingale;
In the prison dark a brave youth sighs,
He sighs and pours out many parting tears.

The frequency of standing epithets, characteristic more or less of all
popular poetry, is particularly observable among the Slavic nations.
The translator will be troubled to find corresponding terms; but
whatever he may select, it is essential always to employ the same;
for instance, he must not translate the far-extended idea of _bjeloi_,
white, alternately by _white, bright, snowy, fair_. In Slavic, not
only things really white are called so, but every thing _laudable_ and
_beautiful_ is called white; as, the _white_ God, i.e. the _good_ God;
the _white_ Tzar, i.e., the monarch of _white_, or great and powerful,
Russia. In most cases the poet himself no longer thinks of the
signification and original meaning of the word. Yards, walls, bodies,
breasts, hands, etc. are invariably _white_; even the breast and the
hand of the tawny Moor. The sea is seldom mentioned without the
epithet _blue_; Russian heroes have _black_ hair, but the head of the
Servian hero is called _Rusja glava_, fair-haired, with a reddish
shade. Russian youths, together with their steeds, are invariably
_dobroe_, that is, good or brave; the heart is in the poetry of the
same nation _retivoe_, cheerful, rash, light. The sun is in Servian
_yarko_, bright; in Russian _krasnoi_, which signifies fair and red.
Doves are in both languages _gray_. How much the poets are accustomed
to these epithets, and how heedlessly they use them, appears from a
Servian tale, called "Haykuna's Wedding," a charming poem, and even
much more elaborated than is common, where the breasts of a beautiful
girl are compared to two gray doves. To remind our readers of the
father of popular poetry, Homer, and of the like use by him of
stereotype epithets, is unnecessary.

The Slavic popular ballads, like the Spanish, very seldom lay any
claim to completeness. They do not pretend to give you a whole story,
but only a _scene_. They are, for the most part, little pictures of
isolated situations, from which it is left to the imagination of the
hearers to infer the whole. The narrative part is almost always
descriptive, and, as such, eminently _plastic_. If the picture
represented has not the dramatic vivacity of the ballads of the
Teutonic nations, it has the distinctness, the prominent forms, and
often the perfection of