always blue at first and
unfathomably aged--return her any answer. It lulls him into the
long spells of sleep so necessary for his first growth. By and
by, when he has found his legs, he begins to skip, and even
before he has found articulate speech, to croon for himself. Pass
a stage, and you find him importing speech, drama, dance,
incantation, into his games with his playmates. Watch a cluster
of children as they enact "Here we go gathering nuts in May"--
eloquent line: it is just what they are doing!--or "Here come
three Dukes a-riding," or "Fetch a pail of water," or "Sally,
Sally Waters":

Sally, Sally Waters,
Sitting in the sand,
Rise, Sally--rise, Sally,
For a young man.

Suitor presented, accepted [I have noted, by the way, that this
game is more popular with girls than with boys]; wedding ceremony
hastily performed--so hastily, it were more descriptive to say
'taken for granted'--within the circle; the dancers, who join
hands and resume the measure, chanting

Now you are married, we wish you joy--
First a girl and then a boy

--the order, I suspect, dictated by exigencies of rhyme rather
than of Eugenics, as Dryden confessed that a rhyme had often
helped him to a thought. And yet I don't know; for the incantation
goes on to redress the balance in a way that looks scientific:

Ten years after, son and daughter,
And now--

[Practically!]

And now, Miss Sally, come out of the water.

The players end by supplying the applause which, in these days of
division of labour, is commonly left to the audience.

III

Well, there you have it all: acting, singing, dancing, choral
movement--enlisted ancillary to the domestic drama: and, when you
start collecting evidence of these imitative instincts blent in
childhood the mass will soon amaze you and leave you no room to
be surprised that many learned scholars, on the supposition that
uncivilised man is a child more or less--and at least so much of
child that one can argue through children's practice to his--have
found the historical origin of Poetry itself in these primitive
performances: 'communal poetry' as they call it. I propose to
discuss with you (may be neat term) in a lecture not belonging to
this 'course' the likelihood that what we call specifically 'the
Ballad,' or 'Ballad Poetry,' originated thus. Here is a wider
question. Did all Poetry develop out of this, historically, as a
process in time and in fact? These scholars (among