said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as
well as of those whose theme is the passion and tragedy of love.
Romance, indeed, is the animating soul of the body of Scottish ballad
poetry; the note that gives it unity and distinguishes it from mere
versified history and folklore. There are few ballads on which some
shadow out of the World Invisible is not cast; few where ill-happed love
is not a master-string of the minstrel's harp; few into which there does
not come strife and the flash of cold steel. Natheless, a broad division
into ballads Supernatural, Romantic, and Martial has reason as well as
convenience to recommend it; and in a loose and general way such an
arrangement should also indicate the comparative age, not indeed of the
ballad versions as we know them, but of the ideas and materials of which
they are composed.

First, then, of the ballads that are steeped in the element of the
supernatural, let it be remembered that it is well-nigh impossible for
us in these days, when we have cleared about us a little island of light
in the darkness, to understand the atmosphere of mystery that pressed
close around the life of man in the age when the ballad had its birth.
The Unknown and the Unseen surrounded him on every side. He could
scarcely put forth a hand without touching things that were not of this
world; and in proportion to the ignorance was the fear. Through the long
twilight in which the primaeval beliefs and superstitions grew up and
became embodied in legend and custom, in _maerchen_ and ballad, and all
through the Middle Ages, man's pilgrimage on earth was indeed through a
Valley of the Shadow. It was a narrow way, between 'the Ditch and the
Quag, and past the very mouth of the Pit,' full of frightful sights and
dreadful noises, of hobgoblins, and dragons, and chimeras dire. Tales
that have ceased to frighten the nursery, that we listen to with a smile
or at most with a pleasant stirring of the blood and titillation of the
nerves, once on a time were the terror of grown men. The ogres and
dragons of old are dead, and the Folklorist and the Comparative
Mythologist make free of their caves, and are busy setting up,
comparing, classifying, and labelling their skeletons for the
instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest
believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest
shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once t