Obscure in their origin, and for the most part having at first had no such auxiliary as written record to aid their preservation, the single fact of the existence of folk-songs may in general suffice to proclaim them the true articulate voice of some sentiment or feeling, common to the large bulk of the people whence they emanate. It is plain that the fittest only can survive--only such as are truly germane to those who say or sing them. A herdsman or tiller of the soil strings together a few verses embodying some simple thought which came into his head whilst he looked at the green fields or the blue skies, or it may be as he acted in a humble way as village poet-laureate. One or two friends get them by heart, and possibly sing them at the fair in the next hamlet: if they hit, others catch them up, and so the song travels for miles and miles, and may live out generations. If not, the effusion of our poetical cowherd dies away quite silently--not much to his distress, for had its fate been more propitious its author would probably have been very little the wiser. One celebrated poet, and I think but one, has in our own times begun his career in like manner with the unknown folk-singer. The songs of Sandor Petöfi were popular over the breadth of the Hungarian Puszta before ever they appeared in print; and those who know him, know how faithfully he breathes forth the soul of the Magyar race. In a certain sense it is true that every real poet is the spokesman of his people. No two works, for instance, are so characteristic of their respective countries as the _Divina Commedia_ and _Faust_. Still, the hands of genius idealise what they touch; the great poet personifies rather than reflects his people, and if he serves them as representative, it is in an august, imperial fashion within the Senate House of Fame, outside whose doors the multitude hustles and seethes. When we want to see this multitude as in a mirror, to judge its common instincts and impulses that go very far to cast the nation in the type which makes it what it is, it is a safer and surer plan to search out its own spontaneous and untutored songs than to consult the master work attached to immortal names.