ullaby of

"Sweetly sleep, my little child,
Lie quiet and still.
The bird nests in the wood,
The flower rests in the meadow grass;
Sweetly sleep, my little child."

This last recalls the esteem our Teuton ancestors had for their scalds,
or polishers of language, when poetry and music were linked together by
the voice and harp of minstrelsy, and when the divine right to fill the
office of bard meant the divine faculty to invent a few heroic stanzas
to meet a dramatic occasion.

One more well-known British lullaby--

"Bye, baby bunting,
Daddy's gone a-hunting
To get a little _hare skin_
To wrap the baby bunting in."

The more modern version gives "_rabbit skin_."

FOOTNOTES:

[B] _Times'_ report, February 10th, 1897.

[C] F. SPIEGEL.

[D] WELCKER, _Griechische Goetterlehre_, i. 551.

[E] TYLOR.

[F] Wagner introduced the music to which it is sung in his _Siegfried_
idyll.

CHAPTER IV.

"One very dark night, when the goblins' light
Was as long and as white as a feather,
A fairy spirit bade me stray
Amongst the gorse and heather.
The pixies' glee enamoured me,
They were as merry as merry could be.

"They held in each hand a gold rope of sand,
To every blue-bell that grew in the dell
They tied a strand,
Then the fairies and pixies and goblins and elves
Danced to the music of the bells
By themselves, merry, merry little selves."

To the kingdom of elf-land few English nursery poems have any reference.
Our continental neighbours have preserved a few, but the major number
are found in versions of the folk-lore tales belonging to the people
dwelling in the hilly districts of remote parts of Europe. Norway,
Switzerland, Italy, and even Poland present weird romances, and our own
country folk in the "merrie north country," and in the lowlands of
"bonnie Scotland," add to the collection. The age to which most of them
may be traced is uncertain; at all events, they bear evidences of
belonging to a period when nature worship was universal, and the
veneration of the mysterious in life common to our ancestors. The Second
Stone Age men, it is said, cremated their dead who were worthy of
reverence, and worshipped their shades, and the nursery tales of pixies
and goblins and elves are but the mythical remains of their once
prevailing religion--universal the world over. The inception of this
an