Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/104

xcviii xcviii INTRODUCTION, Strong, rough, these "canticles of love and woe" still speak the speech of a mass, still feel as a community feels, and touch the heart not as a whisper of private sympathy, but as a great cry of delight or grief from the crowd. They are alien to our introspective age. How few of them, too, have come down to us, and how broken and baffled is the story which they tell ! Whatever the critical view of its origin, all lovers of the ballad will join in the quaint laments of Neocorus ^ for the vanished lays of old, and mourn the quae supersunt which must be written upon even the richest of our collections. first and second persons of the pronoun, " as indeed in many tongues there is evident shyness to name the / and the thouy ^ " Help Gott, wo manige leffliche schone Gesenge an Wort uund Wisen, ach wo vele, sonderlich der olden Leder, ... sin under- gangen!" Chroniky ed. Dahlmann, I, 176.