Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
This grievous measure caused the utmost misery. No Jewish youth leaving home could be sure of returning and seeing his dear ones again. To form an idea of the time we need but read some of the numerous folk-songs of that day. Here is one of many: Quietly I walk in the street, When behind me I hear the rush of feet. Woes have come and sought me, Alas, had I bethought me. "Your passport," they ask.
He is sick of feeding cows and horses; he imagines that, on the pavement of London, he would walk with a manlier tread. There is no help in visions of Arcadia; yet it is plain fact that in days gone by the peasantry found life more than endurable, and yet were more intelligent than our clod-hoppers who still hold by the plough. They had their folk-songs, now utterly forgotten.
The men of the Hardanger fjord have long been distinguished for the workmanship and tonal qualities of their violins, and with them the peasants have improvised the rich and varied impressions of nature which we find embodied in folk-songs. The lur is a long wooden instrument, of the trumpet order, and is usually made of birch bark. It is much used in the mountains.
I recalled one of their pathetic folk-songs in which the wretches were wont to make light of their lamentable estate; a thing I had often heard sung by a black with a banjo on the pier at Brighton; not a genuine black, only dyed for the moment he was, but I had never lost the plaintive quality of the verses: "Away down South in Michigan, Where I was so happy and so gay, 'Twas there I mowed the cotton and the cane "
Old parchments have been found which denote that they had their songs and war-chants at the time of the "home-making," and church and folk-songs from their earliest Christian period. Peasant and nobleman are musical alike it runs in the race. The gipsies that have settled among them caught up the love of music and are now the best interpreters of the Hungarian songs.
I mean also the almost unconscious effort after beauty which one finds among Russian peasants and Chinese coolies, the sort of impulse that creates folk-songs, that existed among ourselves before the time of the Puritans, and survives in cottage gardens.
And after him came a Japanese juggler of prodigious swiftness, and then a fat German woman in peasant guise who sang folk-songs, and wound up with "O, du lieber Augustin!" After which the company joined in the chorus of "Funiculi, funicula" and "Gaudeamus igitur" for the patrons of the "Boheme" were nothing if they were not cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan also was the company at Barry Creston's table.
There was no desire on the part of the editors to write a learned treatise; they simply wished to gather together and record the folk-songs of the Fatherland before they were lost forever.
They are also very musical, and their composers such as Dvorak, Smetana, Novak or Suk, singers such as Emmy Destinn, and violinists such as Kubelik, are known all over the world. They are also developed in all other arts, and their folk-songs, peasant arts and industries, especially those of the Slovaks, bear ample testimony to their natural talents and sense for beauty and art.
All that we know concerning the songs of pastoral nations leads us to suppose that they bear a close resemblance to the type of popular verse current wherever poetry exists, folk-songs of broad humanity in which little stress is laid on the peculiar circumstances of shepherd life.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking