monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention
the power and impressive piece in the "Reliques" entitled "Edward."
Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish,
and Finnish analogues. It is a story of parricide, and is narrated in a
series of questions by the mother and answers by the son. The commonest
form, however, was a mixture of epic and dramatic, or direct relation
with dialogue. A frequent feature is the abruptness of the opening and
the translations. The ballad-maker observes unconsciously Aristotle's
rule for the epic poet, to begin _in medias res_. Johnson noticed this
in the instance of "Johnny Armstrong," but a stronger example is found in
"The Banks of Yarrow:"

"Late at e'en, drinking the wine,
And ere they paid the lawing,
They set a combat them between,
To fight it in the dawing."

With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, which Goethe
mentions in his prefatory note to "Des Saengers Fluch," as a constant note
of the "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations
about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor
fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture;
throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a
background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his
riderless horse comes home, and that is all:

"Toom[9] hame cam the saddle
But never cam he."

Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to die, reluctantly
confessing, under his mother's questioning, that he dined with his
true-love and is poisoned.[10] And again that is all. Or

"--In behint yon auld fail[11] dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

"His hound is to the hunting game,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet."

A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of
these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by
the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side
legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar
to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One
theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the
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