orm of words. Professor ten Brink
tells us that in the ballad-making age there was no production; there
was only reproduction. There was a stock of traditions, memories,
experiences, held in common by large populations, in constant use on the
lips of numberless persons; told and retold in many forms, with
countless changes, variations, and modifications; without conscious
artistic purpose, with no sense of personal control or possession, with
no constructive aim either in plot or treatment; no composition in the
modern sense of the term. Such a mass of poetic material in the
possession of a large community was, in a sense, fluid, and ran into a
thousand forms almost without direction or premeditation. Constant use
of such rich material gave a poetic turn of thought and speech to
countless persons who, under other conditions, would have given no sign
of the possession of the faculty of imagination.

There was not only the stimulus to the faculty which sees events and
occurrences with the eyes of the imagination, but there was also
constant and familiar use of the language of poetry. To speak
metrically or rhythmically is no difficult matter if one is in the
atmosphere or habit of verse-making; and there is nothing surprising
either in the feats of memory or of improvisation performed by the
minstrels and balladists of the old time. The faculty of
improvising was easily developed and was very generally used by
people of all classes. This facility is still possessed by rural
populations, among whom songs are still composed as they are sting,
each member of the company contributing a new verse or a variation,
suggested by local conditions, of a well-known stanza. When to the
possession of a mass of traditions and stories and of facility of
improvisation is added the habit of singing and dancing, it is not
difficult to reconstruct in our own thought the conditions under
which popular poetry came into being, nor to understand in what
sense a community can make its own songs. In the brave days when
ballads were made, the rustic peoples were not mute, as they are
to-day; nor sad, as they have become in so many parts of England.
They sang and they danced by instinct and as an expression of social
feeling. Originally the ballads were not only sung, but they gave
measure to the dance; they grew from mouth to mouth in the very act
of dancing; individual dancers adding verse to verse, and the
frequent refrain coming in as