Excerpt from Songs and Ballads Rather less than half the songs and ballads in the accompanying collection have already appeared in English and American periodicals and as some among these have been several times illustrated by composers, while to a few the compliment of translation has been accorded, their re-appearance here may not prove unwelcome to their former readers. Others now appear in print for the first time. Part of the transcriptions might be more truly termed free fan tasias (in musical parlance) on fragments, broken verses, of partially lost folk-songs; others, to which the authors' names are appended, are as true to their originals as befits translations that rather aim at preserving the spirit than the letter. With the exception of one or two of which I have seen English prose versions, and the Servian song, which Lord Lytton had already translated, these appear, I believe, for the first time in our language. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.