KATHARINE JANFARIE GLENLOGIE GET UP AND BAR THE DOOR THE LAWLANDS O' HOLLAND THE TWA CORBIES HELEN OF KIRCONNELL WALY WALY LORD RONALD EDWARD, EDWARD INTRODUCTION The development of poetry, the articulate life of man, is hidden in that mist which overhangs the morning of history. Yet the indications are that this art of arts had its origin, as far back as the days of savagery, in the ideal element of life rather than the utilitarian. There came a time, undoubtedly, when the mnemonic value of verse was recognized in the transmission of laws and records and the hard-won wealth of experience. Our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose rhyme, it will be remembered, was initial rhyme, or alliteration, have bequeathed to our modern speech many such devices for "the knitting up of the memory," largely legal or popular phrases, as _bed and board_, _to have and to hold_, _to give and to grant_, _time and tide_, _wind and wave_, _gold and gear_; or proverbs, as, for example: _When bale is highest, boon is nighest_, better known to the present age under the still alliterative form: _The darkest hour's before the dawn_. But if we may trust the signs of poetic evolution in barbarous tribes to-day, if we may draw inferences from the sacred character attached to the Muses in the myths of all races, with the old Norsemen, for instance, SagAc being the daughter of Odin, we may rest a reasonable confidence upon the theory that poetry, the world over, finds its first utterance at the bidding of the religious instinct and in connection with religious rites. Yet the wild-eyed warriors, keeping time by a rude triumphal chant to the dance about the watch-fire, were mentally as children, with keen senses and eager imagination, but feeble reason, with fresh and vigorous emotions, but without elaborate language for these emotions. Swaying and shouting in rhythmic consent, they came slowly to the use of ordered words and, even then, could but have repeated the same phrases over and over. The burden--sometimes senseless to our modern understanding--to be found in the present form of many of our ballads may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The "Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of _The Elfin Knight_ is not, in this instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the powers of nature. Such refrains as "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "Jennifer gentle an' rosemaree," "Down, a down, a down, a down," have ancient