has enjoyed.  First published in 1886, it had reached the forty-sixth thousand in 1898.  Of the dramas that by L’Arronge should be valuable, but it has apparently never been published; nor has Otto Ludwig’s operatic fragment,[81] unless recently.  Aside from Geibel, Otto Roquette is the most interesting librettist.  Of the forty-odd (there were forty-two in 1898) composers of Heine’s ballad, the greatest are Schumann, Raff, and Liszt, and in this case Friedrich Sucher,[82] who married the ballad to its now undivorceable melody.

Though Brentano created[83] the story of his ballad, he located it in a region rich in legendary material, and it was the echo-motif of which he made especial use, and traces of this can be found in German literature as early as the thirteenth century.[84] The first real poet to borrow from Brentano was Eichendorff,[85] in whose Ahnung und Gegenwart we have the poem since published separately under the title of “WaldgesprAech,” and familiar to many through Schumann’s composition.[86] That Eichendorff’s Lorelei operates the forest is only to be expected of the author of so many Waldlieder.  Even if Heine had known it he could have borrowed nothing from it except the name of his heroine.[87]

As to Loeben’s saga, there can be but little doubt that he derived his initial inspiration from Schreiber, with whom he became intimately acquainted[88] at Heidelberg during the winter of 1807-8.  This, of course, is not to say that Heine borrowed from Loeben.  Indeed, one of the strongest proofs that Heine borrowed from Schreiber rather than from Loeben is the clarity and brevity, ease and poetry of Schreiber’s saga as over against the obscurity and diffuseness, clumsiness and woodenness of Loeben’s saga,[89] the plot of which, so far as the action is concerned, is as follows:  Hugbert von Stahleck, the son of the Palsgrave, falls in love with the Lorelei and rows out in the night to her seat by the Rhine.  In landing, he falls into the stream, the Lorelei dives after him and brings him to the surface.  The old Palsgrave has, in the meanwhile, sent a knight and two servants to capture the Lorelei.  They climb the lofty rock and hang a stone around the enchantress’ neck, when she voluntarily leaps from the cliff into the Rhine below and is drowned.

The one episode in Loeben not found in any of Schreiber’s Rheinsagen is the story of the castaway ring miraculously restored from the stomach of the fish.  This Loeben could have taken from “Magelone” by Tieck, or “Polykrates” by Schiller, both of whom he revered as men and with whose works he was thoroughly familiar.  But there is nothing in Loeben that Heine could not have derived in more inspiring form from Schreiber; and Schreiber contains essentials not in Loeben at all.  Indeed, a general study of Schreiber’s manuals leads one to believe that the influence of them, as a whole, on Heine would be a most grateful theme:  there is not one Germanic legend referred to in Heine that is not contained in Schreiber.  And as a prose writer, Heine’s fame rests largely on his travel pictures.[90]