variable, and are often interchangeable. Some of them are
'owerwords' literally; that is to say, they simply repeat or echo a word
or phrase of the stanza to which they are attached. A specimen is the
verse from _Johnie o' Braidislee_, quoted in the previous chapter.
Others, and these, as has been said, among the refrains of most ancient
and honourable lineage, bear the appearance of words whose meaning has
been forgotten. 'With rombelogh' has come rumbling down to us from the
days of Bannockburn; and may even then have been of such eld that the
key to its interpretation had already been lost. The 'Hey, nien-nanny'
of the Scottish ballad was, under slightly different forms, old and
quaint in Shakespeare's time, and in Chaucer's. Still others have the
effect upon us of the rhyming prattle invented by children at play. They
are cries, naive or wild, from the age of innocence--cries extracted
from the children of nature by the beauty of the world or the sharp and
relentless stroke of fate. Of such are 'The broom, the bonnie, bonnie
broom,' 'Hey wi' the rose and the lindie o',' 'Blaw, blaw, ye cauld
winds blaw,' and their congeners. These sweet and idyllic notes are
often interposed in some of the very grimmest of our ballads. They
suggest a harping interlude between lines that, without this relief,
would be weighted with an intolerable load of horror or sorrow. There
are refrain lines--'Bonnie St. Johnston stands fair upon Tay' is an
example--which seem to hint that they may have been borrowed from some
old ballad that, except for this preluding or interjected note, has
utterly 'sunk dumb.' But more noticeable are those haunting burdens
which, in certain moods, seem somehow to have absorbed more of the story
than the ballad lines they accompany--that appeal to an inner sense with
a directness and poignancy beyond the power of words to which we attach
a coherent meaning. How deeply the sense of dread, of approaching
tragedy, as well as that of colour and locality, is stimulated by the
iteration of the drear owerword, 'All alone and alonie,' or 'Binnorie, O
Binnorie!' How the horror of a monstrous crime creeps nearer with each
repetition of the cry, 'Mither, Mither!' in the wild dialogue between
mother and son in _Edward_! Like Glenkindie's harping, every stroke
'stounds the heart within'--we scarce can tell how or why.

Like the early Christians, the old balladists seem to have believed in
community of goods. They had a kin