Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/104

 sharper of stroke than any other form of poetry. The writer of a first-rate tragic ballad must be yet more select in his matter and terse in his treatment of what he selects from the heap of possible incident, than Chaucer in the compilation of his "Knight's Tale" from the epic romance of Boccaccio, or Morris in the sculpture of his noble master-poem, "The Lovers of Gudrun," from the unhewn rock of a half-formed history or a half-grown legend. Ballads have been cut out of such poems as these, even as they were carven out of shapeless chronicles. There can be no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that overflows; there must be no waste of a word or a minute in the course of its rapid and fiery motion. Even in our affluent ballad literature there is no more triumphant sample of the greatness that may be won by a poem on these conditions than we find in the ballad of "Sister Helen." The tragic music of its measure, the swift yet solemn harmonies of dialogue and burden, hold in extract the very heart of a tragedy, the burning essence distilled from "Hate born of Love, and blind as he." Higher effect was never wrought out of the old traditions of witchcraft; though the manner of sorcery here treated be one so well known as the form of destroying a man by melting a waxen effigy of him before a continuous flame for the space of three days and nights, after which the dissolution of the fleshly body keeps time to a minute with that of the waxen. A girl forsaken by her high-born lover turns to sorcery for help in her revenge on him; and with the end of the third day come three suppliants, the father and the brothers of the betrayer, to whom he has shown the secret of his wasting