recurring sounds. Sitting up, he found the group of peasants
hanging on the words of an old man, of kindly face, expressive eyes,
and melodious voice, from whose lips flowed a marvellous song; grave
and gay by turns, monotonous and passionate in succession; but
wonderfully fresh, picturesque, and fascinating. The listener soon
became aware that he was hearing, for the first time, the famous
story of "Sadko, the Merchant of Novgorod." It was like being
present at the birth of a piece of literature!

The fact that unwritten songs and stories still exist in great
numbers among remote country-folk of our own time, and that additions
are still made to them, help us to understand the probable origin of
our own popular ballads, and what community authorship may really
mean. To put ourselves, even in thought, in touch with the ballad-
making period in English and Scotch history, we must dismiss from our
minds all modern ideas of authorship; all notions of individual
origination and ownership of any form of words. Professor ten Brink
tells us that in the ballad-making age there was no production;
there was only reproduction. There was a stock of traditions,
memories, experiences, held in common by large populations, in
constant use on the lips of numberless persons; told and retold in
many forms, with countless changes, variations, and modifications;
without conscious artistic purpose, with no sense of personal
control or possession, with no constructive aim either in plot or
treatment; no composition in the modern sense of the term. Such a
mass of poetic material in the possession of a large community
was, in a sense, fluid, and ran into a thousand forms almost without
direction or premeditation. Constant use of such rich material gave a
poetic turn of thought and speech to countless persons who, under
other conditions, would have given no sign of the possession of the