people, not to the Church. He is not swathed in jewelled swaddling clothes; His limbs are free, and He has wings that carry Him wheresoever good children abide. There is about Him all the dreamy charm of lands where twilight is long and shade and shine intermingle softly, and where the earth's wintry winding-sheet is more beautiful than her April bride gown. The most popular of German lullabies is a truly Teutonic mixture of piety, wonder-lore, and homeliness. Wagner has introduced the music to which it is sung into his "Siegfried-Idyll." We have to thank a Heidelberg friend for the text:

Sleep, baby, sleep:

Your father tends the sheep;

Your mother shakes the branches small, Whence happy dreams in showers fall: Sleep, baby, sleep.

Sleep, baby, sleep :

The sky is full of sheep;

The stars the lambs of heaven are,

For whom the shepherd moon doth care:

Sleep, baby, sleep.

Sleep, baby, sleep:

The Christ Child owns a sheep;

He is Himself the Lamb of God;
The world to save, to death He trod :
Sleep, baby, sleep.

In Denmark children are sung to sleep with a cradle hymn which is believed (so we are informed by a youthful correspondent) to be "very old." It has seven stanzas, of which the first runs,

Sleep sweetly, little child; lie quiet and still; as sweetly sleep as the bird in the wood, as the flowers in the meadow. God the Father has said, 'Angels stand on watch where mine, the little ones, are in bed.' A correspondent at Warsaw (still more youthful) sends us the even song of Polish children :

The stars shine forth from the blue sky;

How great and wondrous is God's might! Shine, stars, through all eternity,

His witness in the night.

O Lord, Thy tired children keep :
Keep us who know and feel Thy might;
Turn thine eye on us as we sleep,
And give us all good-night.

Shine, stars, God's sentinels on high,
Proclaimers of His power and might;
May all things evil from us fly:

O stars, good-night, good-night!

Is this" Dobra Noc" of strictly popular origin? From internal evidences we should say that it is not. It seems, how

ever, to be extremely popular in the ordinary sense of the word. Before us lie two or three settings of it by Polish musicians.

The Italians call lullabies ninne-nanne, a term used by Dante when he makes Forese predict the ills which are to overtake the dames of Florence :

E se l'anteveder qui non m' inganna,
Prima fien triste che le guance impeli
Colui che mo si consola con nanna.

Some etymologists have sought to connect "nanna" with nenia or vývitos, but its most apparent relationship is with νανναρίσματα, the modern Greek name for cradle songs, which is derived from a root signifying the singing of a child. to sleep. The ninne-nanne of the various Italian provinces are to be found scattered here and there through volumes of folk poesy, and no attempt has yet been made to collate and compare them. Signor Dal Medico did indeed publish, some ten years ago, a separate collection of Venetian nursery rhymes, but his initiative has not been followed up. The difficulty we have had in obtaining the little work just mentioned is characteristic of the way in which Italian printed matter vanishes out of all being; instead of passing into the obscure but secure limbo into which much of our own literature enters, it attains nothing short of Nirvana-a happy state of non-existence. The inquiries of several Italian booksellers led to no other conclusion. than that the book in question was not to be had for love or money; and most likely we should still have been waiting for it were it not for the courtesy of the Baron Giovanni di Sardagna, who, on hearing that it was wanted by an English student of folk lore, borrowed from the author the only copy in his possession and made therefrom a verbatim transcript. The following is one of Signor Dal Medico's lullabies :

Hush! lulla, lullaby! So mother sings;
For hearken, 'tis the midnight bell that rings.
But, darling, not thy mother's bell is this;
St. Lucy's priests it calls to prayer, I wis.
St. Lucy gave thee eyes-a matchless pair-
And gave the Magdalen her golden hair;
Thy cheeks their hue from heaven's angels
have;

Her little loving mouth St. Martha gave.
Love's mouth, sweet mouth, that Florence hath

for home,

Now tell me where love springs, and how doth come?

With music and with song doth love arise And then its end it hath in tears and sighs.

The question and answer as to the beginning and end of love run through all the songs of Italy and in nearly every case the reply proceeds from Florence. The personality of the answerer changes: sometimes it is a little wild bird; on one occasion it is a preacher. And the idea has been suggested that the last is the original form, and that the Preacher of Florence who preaches against love is none other than Jeronimo Savonarola.

Another of Signor Dal Medico's ninnenanne presents several points of inter

est:

Sleep, O Sleep, O thou beguiler, Sleep, Beguile this child, and in beguilement keep, Keep him three hours, and keep him moments three;

Until I call beguile this child for me.
And when I call I'll call-My root, my heart,
The people say my only wealth thou art.
Thou art my only wealth; I tell thee so.
Now, bit by bit, this boy to sleep will go ;
He falls and falls to sleeping bit by bit,
Like the green wood what time the fire is lit,
Like to green wood that never flame can dart,
Heart of thy mother, of thy father heart!
Like to green wood, that never flame can shoot.
Sleep thou, my cradled hope, sleep thou, my
root,

My cradled hope my spirit's strength and stay;
Mother who bore thee, wears her life away;
Her life she wears away, and all day long
She goes a-singing to her child this song.

Now, in the first place, the comparison of the child's gradual falling asleep with the slow ignition of fresh-cut wood is the common property of all the populations whose ethnical centre of gravity lies in Venice. We have seen an Istriot version of it, and we have heard it sung by a countrywoman at San Martino di Castrozza in the Trentino; so that, at all events, Italia redenta and irredenta has a community of song. The second thing that calls for remark is the direct invocation of sleep. A distinct little group of cradle ditties displays this characteristic. Come, sleep," cries the Grecian mother, come sleep, take him away; come sleep, and make him slumber. Carry him to the vineyard of the Aga, to the gardens of the Aga. The Aga will give him grapes; his wife, roses; his servant, pancakes.' A second Greek Jullaby must have sprung from a luxuriant imagination. It comes from Schio:

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Sleep, carry off my son, o'er whom three sentinels do watch,

Three sentinels, three warders brave, three mates you cannot match.

These guards the sun upon the hill, the eagle on the plain,

And Boreas, whose chilly blasts do hurry o'er the main. The sun went down into the west, the eagle sank to sleep,

Chill Boreas to his mother sped across the briny deep.

'My son, where were you yesterday? Where on the former night

Or with the moon or with the stars did you contend in fight?

Or with Orion did you strive-though him I deem a friend?

Nor with the stars, nor with the moon, did I in strife contend,

Nor with Orion did I fight, whom for your friend I hold,

But guarded in a silver cot a child as bright as gold.'

The Greeks have a curious way of looking at sleep; they seem absorbed in the thought of what dreams may comeif indeed the word dream rightly describes their conception of that which happens to the soul while the body takes its rest-if they do not rather cling to some vague notion of a real severance between matter and spirit during sleep.

The mothers of La Bresse (near Lyons) invoke sleep under the name of "le souin-souin.” We wish we could give here the sweet, inedited melody which accompanies these lines :

Le poupon voudrait bien domir;
Le souin-souin ne veut pas venir,
Souin-souin, vené, vené, vené ;
Souin-souin, vené, vené, donc !

The Chippewaya Indians were in the habit of personifying sleep as an immense insect called Weeng, which some one once saw at the top of a tree engaged in making a buzzing noise with its wings. Weeng produced sleep by sending fairies, who beat the foreheads of tired mortals with very small clubs.

Sleep acts the part of questioner in the lullaby of the Finland peasant woman, who sings to her child in its bark cradle, "Sleep little field bird; sleep sweetly, pretty redbreast. God will wake thee when it is time. Sleep is at the door, and says to me, 'Is not there a sweet child here who fain would sleep? a young child wrapped in swaddling clothes, a fair child resting beneath his woollen coverlet ?'" A questioning

exclaim with profound conviction, while contemplating his son and heir, twentyfour hours old, "There is a great deal of tone about that baby!"'

The Hungarian nurse tells her charge that his cot must be of rosewood and his swaddling clothes of rainbow threads. spun by angels. The evening breeze is to rock him, the kiss of the falling star to awake him; she would have the breath of the lily touch him gently, and the butterflies fan him with their brilliant wings. Like the Sicilian, the Magyar has an innate love of splendor. There is an almost absurd difference between this ambitious style of lullaby and the quaint little German song, of which we owe a translation to Hans Breit

mann

Sleep, baby, sleep.

I can see two little sheep;

One is black and one is white;
And if you do not sleep to-night,
First the black, and then the white,
Will give your little toes a bite.

Corsica has a ninna-nanna into which the whole genius of its people seems to have passed. The village fêtes, with dancing and music, the flocks and herds and sheep-dogs, even the mountains, stars, and sea, and the perfumed air off the macchi, come back to the traveller in that island as he reads

Hushaby, my darling boy;
Hushaby, my hope and joy.
You're my little ship so brave
Sailing boldly o'er the wave;
One that tempests doth not fear,
Nor the winds that blow from high.
Sleep awhile, my baby dear ;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.

After you were born full soon
You were christened all aright;
Godmother she was the moon,
Godfather the sun so bright;
All the stars in heaven told
Wore their necklaces of gold.
Fast awhile in slumber lie;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.
Pure and balmy was the air,
Lustrous all the heavens were,
And the seven planets shed
All their virtues on your head;
And the shepherds made a feast,
Lasting for a week at least.
Fast awhile in slumber lie;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.

Nought was heard but minstrelsy,
Nought but dancing met the eye,
In Cassoni's vale and wood
And in all the neighborhood;

Hawk and Blacklip, stanch and true,
Feasted in their fashion too.
Fast awhile in slumber lie;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.

You are savory, sweetly blowing;
You are thyme of incense smelling,
Upon Mount Basella growing,
Upon Mount Cassoni dwelling;
You the hyacinth of the rocks,
Which is pasture for the flocks.
Fast awhile in slumber lie;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.

At the sight of a new-born babe the Corsican involuntarily sets to work making auguries. The mountain shepherds place great faith in divination based on the examination of the shoulder blades of animals: according to the local tradition the famous prophecy of the greatness of Napoleon was drawn up after this method. The nomad tribes of central Asia search the future in precisely the same way. Corsican lullabies are often prophetical. An old grandmother predicts, as she rocks her grandson's cradle, that when he grows up the salt sea-water will turn to balm, and then goes on to say that if he is driven into a corner he will make a splendid bandit.

It is the custom of all mothers to concern themselves deeply in the matrimonial prospects of their infants. The families who are to have the honor of an alliance with the baby-wonders are naturally considered to be most happy.

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My boy stands on the bridge," sings an Armenian mother (in a song given to us by Dr. Issaverdenz, of San Lazzaro), "he stands on the bridge, and he wears earrings of gold. Carry the tidings to his mother-in-law; let her be proud to hear of so fine a thing."

Japan, as is well known, is the Paradise of childhood, and a Japanese cradle song shall be the last of our illustrations. By the kindness of the author of "Child Life in Japan," we are enabled to print it in the original :

Nén-né ko yō—nén-né ko yo

Nén né no mori wa-doko ye yuta
Ano yama koyété-sato ye yuta
Sato no miyagé ni-nani morota
Tén tén taiko ni-sho no fuyé
Oki-agari koboshima inu hari-ko.

Signifying in English

Lullaby, baby; lullaby, baby.
Baby's nursey where has she gone?

Over those mountains she's gone to her village.
And from her village what will she bring?

A tumtum drum and a bamboo flute, A 'daruma' (which will never turn over) and a paper dog.

Only in one direction have our efforts to find lullabies proved fruitless. America, it seems, has no nursery rhymes except those which are still current in the Old World. We were lately speaking on this subject to a distinguished American who has made his home among us. "Our lullabies," he said, are the same as yours, but we have also a few Dutch ones." And he told us

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how, when he was at a small frontier town on the Rhine, he heard a woman singing her child a song. It was the old story. If the child would not sleep it would be punished; its shoes would be taken away. If it would go to sleep at once, Santa Claus would bring it a beautiful gift. Words and air were familiar to him, and after a moment's reflection he remembered hearing this identical lullaby sung in the Far West of America. Fraser's Magazine.

It is now nearly a quarter of a century ago since a popular novelist revealed to the world in a well-known periodical the existence of the "Unknown Public,' and a very curious revelation it was. He showed us that the few thousands of persons who had hitherto imagined themselves to be the public-so far, at least, as their being the arbiters of popularity in respect to writers of fiction was concerned-were in fact nothing of the kind; that the subscribers to the circulating libraries, the members of book clubs, the purchasers of magazines and railway novels, might indeed have their favorites, but that these last were "nowhere," as respected the number of their backers, in comparison with novelists whose names and works appear in penny journals and nowhere else.

This class of literature was of considerable dimensions even in the days when Mr. Wilkie Collins first called attention to it; but the luxuriance of its growth has since become tropical. His observations are drawn from some half a dozen specimens of it only, whereas I now hold in my hand-or rather in both hands-nearly half a hundred of them. The population of readers must be dense indeed in more than one sense that can support such a crop.

Doubtless the individual circulation of none of these serials is equal to that of the most successful of them at the date of their first discovery; but those who read them must, from various causes, of which the most obvious is the least important, have trebled in number.

Population, that is to say, has increased in very small proportion as compared with the increase of those who very literally run and read-the peripatetic students, who study on their way to work or even as they work, including, I am sorry to say, the telegraph boy on his errand.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding its gigantic dimensions, the Unknown Public remains practically as unknown as ever. The literary wares that find such favor with it do not meet the eye of the ordinary observer. They are to be found neither at the bookseller's, nor on the railway stall. But in back streets, in small dark shops, in the company of cheap tobacco, hardbake (and, at the proper season, valentines), their leaves lie thick as those in Vallombrosa. Early in the week is their springtime, when they are put forth from Heaven knows what printing-houses in courts and alleys, to lie for a few days only on the counter in huge piles. On Saturdays, albeit that is their nominal publishing day, they have for the most part disappeared. For this sort of literature has one decidedly advanced feature, and possesses one virtue of endurance-it comes out ever so long before the date it bears upon its title page, and “when the world shall have passed away" will, by a few days at least, if faith is to be placed in figures, survive it.

Why it should have any date at all no man can tell. There is nothing in the contents that is peculiar to one yearor, to say truth, of one era-rather than