My heart is a clock, And it stops now and then; But a kiss from my lassie Can start it again!
Or with a little pressure on the form, with hint of art, this from Steiermark:[1030]—
You are fair, you are dear, But you are not my own; You’d be fairer yet, dearer yet, Were you my own!
Familiar as a source of quatrains is the youth pleading or querulous outside of the fair one’s window, and the maid doubtful or scornful within; there are a few English fragments of this sort which are printed in Chappell,[1031] and some are still heard in the rural parts. The Salzburg youth pleads thus:[1032]—
Ah, love, lift the latch,— Here the wind is so bleak; With thee in the house there How cozy and sweet!
From this, with hundreds of the sort, runs a lyrical path, if one could but trace it, to the elaborate ode of Horace,[1033] imitated, of course, from the Greek, and its type long become the conventional treatment of an unconventional situation, but no doubt at the start expanded from shorter and more vivid songs of “the excluded lover,” of which one finds a scrap in the other and more famous ode on the courtesan’s old age:—
Audis minus et minus iam “_Me tuo longas pereunte noctes, Lydia, dormis?_”[1034]
One has heard the Salzburg youth; and the Salzburg maid is explicit in her reply:[1035]—
Go away from my window, And leave me alone; The door I’ll not open However you moan,
a striking contrast to the complacency of a _schnaderhüpfl_, said to be one of the oldest recorded, taken down by Tobler at Appenzell, in 1754:—
Mine, mine, mine, O my love is fine, And to-night he shall come to me; Till the clock strikes eight, till the clock strikes nine, My door shall open be.
But one must stay by the dancing throng, the rivalry of the singers, the question and answer, a succession of stanzas thus tending to group about a theme given by the occasion and kept in mind by a constant suggestion of rime and repeated or slightly varied verses; from all this it is highly probable that one will learn something of the communal origins of lyric poetry. Thus there is nothing immediate or suggestive of the dance in a detached quatrain with question and answer like this:[1036]—
Why crying, my pretty, By the tree there alone? Why should I not cry When my sweetheart is gone?