they have made their way into all the literature of
Europe. Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Blue Beard, the Little Old
Woman Cut Shorter, and the Giant who smelled the blood of an Englishman
(the Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum of our nursery days), were all heroes and
heroines of Scandinavian songs, later adapted in various ways to the
use of different countries. After awhile this lost art revived in the
Romances of chivalry, and in popular ballads. They describe all the
changes in life and society, and are akin to the ballads of the British
Isles. In them we find the common expression of the life and feelings
of a common race. The same stories often influenced the bards of all
countries at different periods. These ballads are all written in the
same form and express a certain poetic feeling which is not found in
the Epic Age. In all countries they had a refrain, or chorus, which
marks the migration of poetry from the Epic to the Lyric form.

"This simple voice of song," to quote a modern author, "travelled
onward from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, the language of the
general sorrows, hopes and memories; strange, and yet near to every
one, centuries old, yet never growing older, since the human heart,
whose history it relates in so many changing images and notes, remains
forever the same."

SLAVONIC (RUSSIA).

Schlegel says of the Russian Nation:

"Her subjection to the Greek Church was alone sufficient during the
Middle Ages, and is in some measure sufficient even in our own time, to
keep Russia politically and intellectually at a distance from the rest
of the Western world."

Little if any part was taken by the Slavs in the Crusades. They had
hardly any of the spirit of chivalry, and their belief, during their
period of barbaric heathenism, was not so romantic and ideal as the
Gothic.

The heroic prose tales of Russia are older and more popular than her
ballads. They are told in the nurseries, and recount the heroic deeds
of Vladimir the Great. The ballads are mostly a recital of the feuds
between the Poles and the Tartars, not unlike the Border ballads of
Scotland.

Their greatest hero is Yermak, who conquered the Mongols, and in the
fifteenth century won for the Czars the country that is now called
Siberia. Yermak's deeds and praises are sung from one end of Russia to
the other, even at the present day; and the poorest peasants usually
have a colored print representing him on horseback, nailed to the wall