Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/252

 244 his own kindred of Dutch extraction in the United States. But the difficulty of getting news of songs did not persuade me that none such existed. The folk-lore student is accustomed to this kind of discouragement, and he may fairly trust his own intuitions rather than the statements, however positive, of unqualified persons. Now, though at first sight so young a country as America might be pronounced an unfruitful field, a little reflection suffices to show that in reality it ought to be the very reverse. America has been cut off in a great measure from the action of those disintegrating forces which have broken up so large a part of European, and especially of English, traditions. There are quiet nooks in New England where the English hamlet of two or three hundred years ago is not less perfectly represented than is old rural France in the neat homesteads of the habitans of Canada. What more admirable picture of antiquated village life could be desired than that given in what it is hardly rash to call the most memorable of recent fictions—"Cape Cod Folks"? Americans who are freshly come over to Europe—even those, sometimes, who imagine themselves the personification of the New Idea—are apt to strike one chiefly by a strange but charming archaism of speech, manner, and mode of thought. The reiterated "Sir" is only a relic of byegone courtesy; and, as has been proved over and over again, nine-tenths of "Americanisms" are to be found in Shakespeare. Thus we have a good right to expect, now that folk-lore is beginning to attract serious notice across the Atlantic, that our knowledge will be enriched by many valuable additions and corrections.

Mr. Newell's instalment is welcome, both on account of the matter contained and of the agreeable and conscientious way in which it is presented. Under the head of "Introductory" the editor writes of the characteristics of child-nature with an insight that shows him to have dived deep into its secrets. A child's imagination is, as he truly says, infinitely more on the alert than that of a grown-up person. Children, who are destined to become very ordinary and matter-of-fact men and women, arc surrounded by a world of gracious unreality of which a few years are enough to efface even the memory. Only poets preserve through life somewhat of the enchanted castle of childhood. Then again, within certain bounds, children's powers of acquirement