All can sympathise with the youth, who could
not shudder and who would fain acquire the gift.
From English literature we gain no more than brief, tantalising
glimpses of the vast treasury of folk-tales and ballads that
existed before literature became an art and that lived on side by
side with it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet here
and there we catch sudden gleams like the fragment in _King
Lear_:
"Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum,
I smell the blood of a British man."
or Benedick's quotation from the _Robber Bridegroom_:
"It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that
it should be so."
which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and
inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror is
touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons "in
earthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, Sweet
William's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, when
Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to
his mistress, True Thomas's ride to Fairyland, when:
"For forty days and forty nights,
He wade through red blood to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea."
The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed
down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural
wonder and enchantment.
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