goes back into his grave. She waits long, and at last
follows him. When she sees the nine fresh graves, a painful
presentiment seizes her. She hurries to the house of her mother. When
she knocks at the door, the aged mother, half distracted, thinks it is
"the plague of the Lord," which, after having carried off her nine
sons, comes for her. The mother and daughter die in each other's
arms.[11]

This simple and affecting tale affords, then, the only instance, in
Slavic popular poetry, of a regular apparition; but even here that
apparition has, as our readers have seen, a character very different
from that of a Scotch or German ghost. The same ballad exists also in
modern Greek; although in a shape perhaps not equal in power and
beauty to the Servian.[12]

But the very circumstance that its subject is so isolated among the
Slavic nations, who are so ready to seize other poetical ideas and to
mould them in various ways, leads us to believe, that the Servian poet
must have heard somehow or other the Greek ballad, or a similar one;
and that the subject of the Servian ballad, although this is familiar
to all classes, was originally a stranger in Servia. Nowhere indeed,
in the whole range of Slavic popular poetry, do we meet with that
mysterious gloom, with those enigmatical contradictions, which are
peculiar to the world of spirits of the Teutonic North; and which we
think find their best explanation in the antithesis between the
principles of Christianity, and the ruins of paganism on which it was
built.

It is true, that, wherever Christianity has been carried, similar
contradictions must necessarily have taken place: but the mind of the
Slavic nations, so far as it is manifest in their poetry, seems never
to have been perplexed by these contradictions. History shows, that
the Slavic nations, with the exception of those tribes who were
excited to headstrong opposition by the cruelty and imprudence of
their German converters, received Christianity with childlike
submission; in most cases principally because their superiors adopted
it.[13] Vladimir the Great, to whom the Gospel and the Koran were
offered at the same time, was long undecided which to choose; and was
at last induced to embrace the former, because "his Russians could not
live without the pleasure of drinking."[14] The wooden idols, it is
true, were solemnly destroyed; but numerous fragments of their altars
were suffered to remain undisturbed at the foot of