must descend from our fine palaces, and know it in the place where it
grows, and become one with them who brought it forth. We must live
their life, must learn so see what they see, to love what they love,
if we would understand their language.

Precisely parallel is the art in which the English genius specially
delighted, architecture. Noble and simple, learned and lewd, severed
by the Conquest, were united in the church, and our cathedrals are in
the truest sense the creations of the people. Like the _Volkslieder_,
like the great epics and the Icelandic Sagas, these works are anonymous.
No one knows, and no one seems to have cared, who made them. They were
built for the glory of God, not for that of man.

In about the twelfth century in Germany the whole community was one
body, scarcely differentiated into classes as regards their
Intellectual life. There were masters and servants, noblemen and
plebeians, as now, but they followed the same ends, received the same
education, and shared the same amusements. The _Volk_ was the
entire community, from the prince on the throne to the village child.
Literary education was confined to the clerical orders. The word
"ballad," which is, or was, the English equivalent of _Volkslied_,
signifies a dance, and at this early period the bond between dance and
song was still intact; the song was danced, and the dance sung to, as
it is to this day in the Shetland and Faroe islands, and in parts of
Norway and elsewhere. The ballad was a popular composition, in the sense
just described, but this does not mean that ballads grew up of
themselves, as wild flowers. Each owed its origin to some poet, who
composed music and words together. But the people who sang it cared
little for the personality of the poet; so long as his song was a good
one it was received and sung, but he was forgotten. Nor did they show