ssor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad
collection--contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript,
some of them obtained in America![2]

Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the
notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so
that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents,
descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the
different ballads. The circumstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar
springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches
occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas
and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight
who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and
abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas
Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may
be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property,
and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an
uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed,
they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor
of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone
could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels,
ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their
dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different
audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit
added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on.

Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild,
and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style
and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the
poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization
and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"
are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical
peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the
conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks,
the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to
this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song. As in the
companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the
schools of earl