e regions round Pistoja and Siena, where on
the spurs of the Apennines the purest Italian is vernacular. Some,
again, are importations from other provinces, especially from Sicily
and Naples, caught up by the peasants of Tuscany and adapted to their
taste and style; for nothing travels faster than a _Volkslied_. Born
some morning in a noisy street of Naples, or on the solitary slopes of
Radicofani, before the week is out, a hundred voices are repeating it.
Waggoners and pedlars carry it across the hills to distant towns. It
floats with the fishermen from bay to bay, and marches with the
conscript to his barrack in a far-off province. Who was the first to
give it shape and form? No one asks, and no one cares. A student well
acquainted with the habits of the people in these matters says, 'If
they knew the author of a ditty, they would not learn it, far less if
they discovered that it was a scholar's.' If the cadence takes their
ear, they consecrate the song at once by placing it upon the honoured
list of 'ancient lays.' Passing from lip to lip and from district to
district, it receives additions and alterations, and becomes the
property of a score of provinces. Meanwhile the poet from whose soul
it blossomed that first morning like a flower, remains contented with
obscurity. The wind has carried from his lips the thistledown of song,
and sown it on a hundred hills and meadows, far and wide. After such
wise is the birth of all truly popular compositions. Who knows, for
instance, the veritable author of many of those mighty German chorals
which sprang into being at the period of the Reformation? The first
inspiration was given, probably, to a single mind; but the melody, as
it has reached us, is the product of a thousand. This accounts for the
variations which in different dialects and districts the same song
presents. Meanwhile, it is sometimes possible to trace the authorship
of a ballad with marked local character to an improvisatore famous in
his village, or to one of those professional rhymesters whom the
country-folk employ in the composition of love-letters to their
sweethearts at a distance.[25] Tommaseo, in the preface to his 'Canti
Popolari,' mentions in particular a Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani,
whose poetry was famous through the mountains of Pistoja; and Tigri
records by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made rispetti by
the dozen as she watched her sheep upon the hills. One of the songs in
his collectio