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are the scenery of pastoral life—and their subjects the domestic affections. Their more quiet accompaniments are flowers and rivulets, and the green turf—roses for maidens—rosemary for lovers—and the asociations of the most impassioned fragments are rocks, and mountains and dark clouds. But none of them have the wild mythology, nor the fabulous historical adornings of the more oriental slavonians.
I have not used a collection of bohemian songs, České národni pjsně, by Ritter von Rittersberg, published at Prague in 1825. They are german as well as slavonian, and do not appear to have been selected with any regard to their poetical merits. In truth they are not much better than the "London cries," and appear mostly gathered up from among the inhabitants of towns. They are many of them translations from austrian german—and have little of the raciness, and less of the simplicity, of slavonian popular poetry. The object of the collector was, I believe, rather to exhibit the music of Bohemia, than to publish the best specimen of its songs.
