I think the
girl is learned, for she has knowledge of books and of the pen,
and a schoolmaster coming to teach her every day.

'The troop is on the sea, sailing eternally, and looking always on
my Nora Ban. Is it not a great sin, she to be on a bare mountain,
and not to be dressed in white silk, and the king of the French
coming to the island for her, from France or from Germany?

'Is it not nice the jewel looked at the races and at the church in
Barna? She took the sway there as far as the big town. Is she not
the nice flower with the white breast, the comeliness of a woman?
and the sun of summer pleased with her, shining on her at every
side, and hundreds of men in love with her.

'It is I would like to run through the hills with her, and to go
the roads with her; and it is I would put a cloak around my Nora
Ban.'

The very _naivete_, the simplicity of these ballads, make one feel that
the peasants who make and sing them may be trembling on the edge of a
great discovery; and that some day--perhaps very soon--one born among
them will put their half-articulate, eternal sorrows and laments and
yearnings into words that will be their expression for ever, as was done
for the Hebrew people when the sorrow of exile was put into the hundred
and thirty-seventh Psalm, and the sorrow of death into the lament for
Saul and Jonathan, and the yearning of love into what was once known as
'the ballad of ballads,' the Song of Solomon.

I have one ballad at least to give, that shows, even in my prose
translation, how near that day may be, if the language that holds the
soul of our West Irish people can be saved from the 'West Briton'
destroyer. There are some verses in it that attain to the intensity of
great poetry, though I think less by the creation of one than by the
selection of many minds; the peasants who have sung or recited their
songs from one generation to another, having instinctively sifted away
by degrees what was trivial, and kept only what was real, for it is in
this way the foundations of literature are laid. I first heard of this
ballad from the South; but when I showed it to an Aran man, he said it
was well known there, and that his mother had often sung it to him when
he was a child. It is called 'The Grief of a Girl's Heart':--

'O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and
do not forget it; and you will have a