as natural as speech itself to man. Lullabies are found in every land;
everywhere the joyous mother-heart bursts forth into song. The German
proverb is significant: "Wer ein saugendes Kind hat, der hat eine
singende Frau," and Fischer, a quaint poet of the sixteenth century, has
beautifully expressed a like idea:--

"Wo Honig ist, da sammlen sieb die Fliegen, Wo Kinder sind, da singt man
um die Wiegen."

Ploss, in whose book is to be found a choice collection of lullabies
from all over the globe, remarks: "The folk-poetry of all peoples is
rich in songs whose texts and melodies the tender mother herself
imagined and composed" (326. II. 128).

The Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco devotes an interesting chapter of her
_Essays in the Study of Folk-Song_ to the subject of lullabies. But
not cradle-songs alone have sprung from woman's genius. The world over,
dirges and funeral-laments have received their poetical form from the
mother. As name-giver, too, in many lands, the mother exercised this
side of her imaginative faculty. The mother and the child, from whom
language received its chief inspiration, were also the callers forth of
its choicest and most creative form.


_Mother-Wit._

"An ounce o' mother-wit is worth a pound o' clergy," says the Scotch
proverb, and the "mother-wit," _Muttergeist_ and _Mutterwitz_,
that instructive common-sense, that saving light that make the genius
and even the fool, in the midst of his folly, wise, appear in folk-lore