Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/14

 formed the lands of the Lithuanian crown, and later with Lithuania became part of Poland. White Russian was actually chosen as the official language of Lithuania in the Middle Ages, the mother-tongue being considered too rustic a medium, and of too restricted resources to afford a suitable vocabulary for the redaction of state documents.

The best Lithuanian literature consists of traditional folk-songs and ballads, only a small proportion of which have been written down and edited. The brave efforts of native authors to develop a school of poetry inspired by the phenomena of the Lithuanian landscape and the characteristics of local meteorology have been only moderately successful, but the national songs contain many lines of profound sentiment, and are full of quaint and gentle expressions. Also they abound in allusions to a lost and only half-intelligible mythology.

In recent years gratifying signs of increasing interest in their own language and literature have been noticeable amongst the Lithuanians. Against this must be set the uninterrupted stream of emigration towards America, which has already drained the home-country to the extent of half a million people, or one-sixth of the whole nation. The Lithuanian community in America publish newspapers, books, and dictionaries with an energy that betrays the influence of their new surroundings, yet the wholesale appropriation of necessary but inadequately assimilated Americanisms, together with prolonged absence from the secular traditions of the mother-country, must at an increasing rate lower the standard of linguistic purity. In Lithuania itself, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy of German in the west and Russian in the east cannot fail to militate in course of time against the integrity of this humble but ancient and gentle tongue, even if its continued existence be not imperilled.

The name Žmud, applied by Poles and Russians to the Lithuanians living north of the Niemen, simply means 'Lowlanders', and to the Lithuanians of East Prussia all