ession of communal rejoicing. What the people once sang in chorus
was repeated by the individual poet. Neidhart the German is famous on
account of his rustic songs for the dance, which often begin with this
lusty welcome to spring: while the dactyls of Walther von der
Vogelweide not only echo the cadence of dancing feet, but so nearly
exclude the reflective and artistic element that the "I" of the singer
counts for little. "Winter," he sings,--

Winter has left us no pleasure at all;
Leafage and heather have fled with the fall,
Bare is the forest and dumb as a thrall;
If the girls by the roadside were tossing the ball,
I could prick up my ears for the singing-birds' call![4]

[2] The first stanza in the original will show the structure
of this true "ballad" in the primitive sense of a dance-song.
There are five of these stanzas, carrying the same rhymes
throughout:--

A l'entrada del temps clar,--eya,--
Per joja recomencar,--eya,--
E per jelos irritar,--eya,--
Vol la regina mostrar
Qu' el' est si amoroza.

REFRAIN

Alavi', alavia, jelos,
laissaz nos, laissaz nos
ballar entre nos, entre nos!

[3] Games and songs of children are still to be found which
preserve many of the features of these old dance-songs. The
dramatic traits met with in the games point back now to the
choral poetry of pagan times, when perhaps a bit of myth was
enacted, now to the communal dance where the stealing of a
bride may have been imitated.

[4] Unless otherwise credited, translations are by the
writer.

That is, "if spring were here, and the girls were going to the village
dance"; for ball-playing was not only a rival of the dance, but was
often combined with it. Walther's dactyls are one in spirit with the
fragments of communal lyric which have been preserved for us by
song-loving "clerks" or theological students, those intellectual
tramps of the Middle Ages, who often wrote down such a merry song of
May and then turned it more or less freely into their barbarous but
not unattractive Latin. For example:--

Now is time for holiday!
Let our singing greet the May:
Flowers in the breezes play,
Every holt and heath is gay.

Let us dance and let us spring
With merry song and crying!
Joy befits the lusty May:
Set the ball a-flying!
If I woo my lady-love,
Will she be denying?[5]

[5]