At the festivals and assemblies near the cloisters

In the more numerous assemblies, the heroic sorm prevails; and at taverns, Avliere card-playing is yet unknown, it constitutes the principal entertainment: the singer is lie who has first taken thegusle into his hand, and AVIIO is best able to accompany it with his voice. At the festivals and assemblies near the cloisters, parties stand forward who have devoted themselves exclusively to singing  including the blind; who, however  especially in Servia  are oftener singers than composers of songs. Men of real poetic talent, like Philip Wisli- nitsch from Bosnia, are occasionally met with, who collect a circle around them, and often move their audience to tears.

Nor have those Servians who have gone over to Islaniism been able to subdue their affection for poesy. Christians and Mahometans frequently have the same heroic song; the only difference being that each claims the victory for the adherents to its own faith.

The Chiefs, though they would not take part in the song, listen to it with delight; and in Sarajewo, they once induced the Kadi to liberate a Christian prisoner, merely because his songs pleased them. The difference of religion is overcome by poesy: it unites the whole race it lives throughout the nation. The mountains, where the herdsman tends the cattle; the plains, on which the harvest is reaped; the forest, through which the traveller makes his way  all resound with  song: it forms an accompaniment to business of all sorts. What, then, are the subjects of these strains, which under circumstances so infinitely varied, are thus interwoven with life, while they are almost unconsciously raised above it ?

What man strongly feels, he naturally seeks to express. Here, where no external model presents itself, the inward spiritual existence, from which all our thoughts and actions proceed, is manifested, by words, according to its own peculiar originality. In the light of innate thought, which is the spirit of life, poetry conceives its ideas, and reproduces them true to nature, but in purer and more abstract forms; at once individual and symbolical.

Servian song discloses the domestic life of the people: it pays due honour to the husbandman “who has black hands, but eats white bread;” it loves to dwell with fondness on the old man with venerable flowing beard, whose soul, when he leaves the earthly temple of his God, has become pure as ether, or the breath of a flower ; but it most luxuriates in those affections which exalt the worth of a family and maintain it in integrity and honour.