with “The Chase,” a translation of Buerger’s “Der Wilde Jaeger.”  The two poems made a thin quarto volume.  It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous, and was Walter Scott’s first published book.  Meanwhile Taylor had given his rendering to the public in the March number of the Monthly Magazine, introducing it with a notice of Burger’s poems; and the very same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J. T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,—­author of “Beth Gelert.”  “Too Late I Stayed,” etc.,—­with designs by Lady Diana Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum, sold at Christie’s in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev. James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the most faithful, if not the best, English version of the ballad.[21]

The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the varied titles “Lenore,” “Leonore,” “Leonora,” “Lenora,” “Ellenore,” “Helen,” etc., was indeed a noteworthy one.  In the original, it remains Buerger’s masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained perhaps as many graces as it lost.  It was first printed at Goettingen in Boie’s “Musen Almanach” in 1773.  It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years’ War, and who came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her off a thousand miles to the bridal bed.  She mounts behind him and they ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to a churchyard.  The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover’s armor drops from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within, and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and her bridegroom is Death.  “This poem,” says Scherer, “leaves on us, to some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened; was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed, with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in “The Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel”; so that the boundary between the earthly and the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer form of allegory.  “Lenore” drew for its materials upon ballad motives common to many literatures.  It will be sufficient to mention “Sweet William’s Ghost,” as an English example of the class.

Scott’s friends assured him that his translation was superior to Taylor’s, and Taylor himself wrote to him:  “The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer.”  But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor’s version, which has a wildness and quaintness not found in Scott’s more literal and more polished rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the Grobheit, the rude, rough manner of popular poetry.  A few stanzas from each will illustrate the difference: