SERENADE SONG OF A CHIPEWAY LOVER TO HIS MISTRESS.
I would walk into somebody’s dwelling, Into somebody’s dwelling would I walk.
Into _thy_ darkened dwelling, my beloved, Some night would I walk, would I walk.
Some night at this season, my beloved, Into thy darkened dwelling would I walk.
On this very night, my beloved, Into thy darkened dwelling would I walk.
While dealing with these amatory effusions, I will add one or two from another part of the map, from the tribes who make their home in our sister republic, Mexico. You are aware that there are many tribes there barely tinged with European culture or religion. They retain the ancestral tongues and modes of thought. The sword and whip of the Spaniard compelled an external obedience to church and state, but the deference to either was reluctant, and in the minimum degree. Consequently, there also the field for research is rich and practically uncultivated. To employ a native metaphor, frequent in the Aztec poets, I will cause you to smell the fragrance of a few of the flowers I have gathered from those meads.
My late friend, Dr. Berendt, personally known, I doubt not, to some present, obtained a curious Aztec love-song from the lips of an Indian girl in the Sierra of Tamaulipas. It is particularly noticeable from the strange, mystical conceit it contains that to the person who truly loves, the mere bodily presence or absence of the beloved object is unimportant, nay, not even noticed. The literal translation of this song is as follows:
I know not whether thou hast been absent: I lie down with thee, I rise up with thee, In my dreams thou art with me. If my ear drops tremble in my ears, I know it is thou moving within my heart.
This rough rendering has been put into metrical form as follows:
I knew it not that thou hadst absent been, So full thy presence all my soul had left; By night, by day, in quiet or changing scene, ’Tis thee alone I see, sense of all else bereft. And when the tinkling pendants sway and ring, ’Tis thou who in my heart dost move and sing.
In another love-song in the same language I have met a conceit which I distinctly remember to have read in some old English poet, that of a lover who complains that his heart has been gathered in along with her flowers by a maiden picking roses.