A goodly number of famous modern ballads are included; and at the end of the volume are 10 short narrative poems of “Pilgrimage and Souls so Strong.”
At the end of the book are a Glossary and Indexes of subjects, authors, titles, and first lines.
Since great care has been taken to choose authoritative texts (see Acknowledgments, page xv and Suggestions for Teachers, page 363), the teacher will find this collection helpful when instructing classes in early English literature or in ballad structure and measure.
The Glossary for classroom use is placed at the back of the book, not in footnotes, because children who are reading for enjoyment easily learn new words from the context.
The collection may be used for story-hours; or, as older boys and girls prefer being read aloud to, in it may be found an abundance of material for weekly poetry hours and for memorizing.
Ballads are the natural heritage of every boy and girl. Ballads are tuned to the very pulse of Youth. They are red-blooded: joyous with the freshness of Springtime, and robust with the early Summer of Life. They appeal with peculiar delight to growing boys and girls, satisfying, as do no other poems, their craving for emotional expression in quick, rhythmic form.
Ballads not only feed the romantic spirit of young people, but teach them much homely wisdom. They are essentially democratic and human. In them Kings and tinkers, Knights and shepherds, meet, talk, and feast together like comrades.
And because the vigour of Youth so animates the old ballads, young folk read them eagerly, learn them almost without effort, and recite them with gusto. The wild, free life in the good greenwood, the chivalry, mystery, pathos, heroic deeds, and thrilling experiences--in fact, Life itself running the whole gamut of human emotions--enthrall the ever eager, questioning, shifting moods of boys and girls.
The human and universal in the ancient ballads, their eternal youthful appeal, are rooted deepset in the daily life of the People. Their very meter and airs are natural growths like the sheath of a wildflower. For in those good old ballad-making days, minstrels, the welcome guests of rich and poor, wandered from castle to cot and inn, from eyrie-like retreats of Highland chiefs to fortified border-towers of the Lowland or “North Contraye.” And as the minstrels rested their harps or bagpipes on the earthen floors of cottages, or while they sat feasting with nobles in baronial halls, they heard peasants, working-folk, servitors, squires, ladies, and returned Crusaders, telling of their adventures on land and sea, in fights, battles, border-raids, in abductions of lovely maidens, in combats with Saracens and with Laidley monsters, in meetings with Faërie Knights and Elfin Queens all under the greenwood-shade. They heard, also, tales of changelings and visits to Fairyland; stories of Ghosts, Ghouls, and Witches; legends of the sea; and traditions of national heroes.