A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY, 163 



primrose are open in the dusking air. We drift upon 

 verse again ; touch on the new poetry books, their 

 leanness; and discuss the modern equivalents in 

 Arnington to the ballad and its kind. I give 

 Gervase a few selections from our Volkslieder : they 

 are fearful when merely repeated ; but their effect 

 when rendered at Choir Suppers and Harvest Homes, 

 through the blue smoke and beery air, is not to be 

 imagined. We have some examples of (I think) 

 native strains, melancholy rubbish such as What is the 

 Life of a Man, more than the Leaves on the Trees > a 

 village classic which one Joe Vinall used to copy out 

 for singing-men at a shilling a-piece ; but these are 

 outnumbered by the strange Irish-American species, 

 of which The Fire in the Grate and Pm a Man has 

 done wrong to his Parents are representative. Even 

 these are giving way to the mere music-hall froth, 

 which filters down to Arnington some three months 

 after the London vogue. 



Gervase thinks that we can't expect much from 

 secular lyres while we sing such rot in the way of 

 hymns on Sunday rhymes that would not be 

 stood in a pantomime, and drivelling familiarities of 

 expression. It occurred to me here that my morn- 

 ing meditation upon the decay of taste in greenstuff, 

 the tolerance of the caulis suburbanus and his kind, 



