strangers,
In the keeping of the stepdame.
She would drive the little orphan.
Drive the child with none to love him,
To the cold side of the chimney,
To the north side of the cottage.
Where the wind that felt no pity,
Bit the boy with none to shield him.
Larklike, then, I forth betook me,
Like a little bird to wander.
Silent, o'er the country straying
Yon and hither, full of sadness.
With the winds I made acquaintance
Felt the will of every tempest.
Learned of bitter frost to shiver,
Learned too well to weep of winter.

Yet there be full many people
Who with evil voice assail me,
And with tongue of poison sting me,
Saying that my lips are skilless,
That the ways of song I know not,
Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings.
Ah, you should not, kindly people,
Therein seek a cause to blame me,
That, a child, I sang too often,
That, unfledged, I twittered only.
I have never had a teacher,
Never heard the speech of great men,
Never learned a word unhomely,
Nor fine phrases of the stranger.
Others to the school were going,
I alone at home must keep me,
Could not leave my mother's elbow,
In the wide world had her only;
In the house had I my schooling,
From the rafters of the chamber.
From the spindle of my mother,
From the axehelve of my father,
In the early days of childhood;
But for this it does not matter,
I have shown the way to singers,
Shown the way, and blazed the tree-bark,
Snapped the twigs, and marked the footpath;
Here shall be the way in future,
Here the track at last be opened
For the singers better-gifted,
For the songs more rich than mine are,
Of the youth that now are waxing,
In the good time that is coming!

Like Virgil's husbandman, our minstrel did not know how well off he was
to have been without schooling. This, I think, every one feels at once
to be poetry that sings itself. It makes its own tune, and the heart
beats in time to its measure. By and by poets will begin to say, like
Goethe, "I sing as the bird sings"; but this poet sings in that fashion
without thinking of it or knowing it. And it is the very music of his
race and country which speaks through him with such simple pathos.
Finland is the mother and Russia is the stepdame, and the listeners to
the old national lays grow fewer every day. Before long the Fins will be
writing songs in the manner of Heine, and dramas in imitation of
"F