In 1827 Carlyle[25] published translations of five of Tieck’s “Maehrchen,” viz.:  “The Fair-Haired Eckbert,” “The Trusty Eckart,” “The Elves,” “The Runenberg,” and “The Goblet.”  He mentioned that another tale had been already Englished—­“The Pictures” (Die Gemaelde).  This version was by Connop Thirwall, who had also rendered “The Betrothal” in 1824.  In spite of Carlyle’s recommendations, Tieck’s stories seem to have made small impression in England.  Doubtless they came too late, and the romantic movement, by 1827, had spent its first force in a country already sated with Scott’s poems and novels.  Sarah Austin, a daughter of William Taylor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German literature in this same year 1827.  In her “Fragments from German Prose Writers” (1841), she speaks of the small success of Tieck’s stories in England, but testifies that A. W. Schlegel’s dramatic lectures had been translated early and the translation frequently reprinted.  Another of the Norwich Taylors—­Edgar—­was the translator of Grimm’s “Haus- und Kinder-Maehrchen.”  Julius Hare, who was at school at Weimar in the winter of 1804-5, rendered three of Tieck’s tales, as well as Fouque’s “Sintram” (1820).

It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to Hawthorne and Poe.  The latter mentions his “Journey into the Blue Distance” in his “Fall of the House of Usher”, and in an early review of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales” (1842) and “Mosses from an Old Manse” (1846), at a time when their author was still, in his own words, “the obscurest man of letters in America.”  Poe acutely pointed out a resemblance between Hawthorne and Tieck; “whose manner,” he asserts, “in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne.”  One finds a confirmation of this apercu—­or finds, at least, that Hawthorne was attracted by Tieck—­in passages of the “American Note-Books,” where he speaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sitting, by the aid of a German dictionary.  Colonel Higginson ("Short Studies"), a propos of Poe’s sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary citations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fascinatingly entitled “Journey into the Blue Distance”; and to having been laughed at for his pains by a friend who assured him that Poe could scarcely read a word of German.  But Tieck did really write this story, “Das Alte Buch:  oder Reise ins Blaue hinein,” which Poe misleadingly refers to under its alternate title.  There is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck’s “Maehrchen”—­which are far from being mere fairy tales—­that reminds one frequently of Hawthorne’s shadowy art—­of such things as “Ethan Brand,” or “The Minister’s Black Veil,” or “The Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains.”  There is, e.g., “The Elves,” in which a little girl does but step across the foot-bridge over the brook that borders her father’s garden, to find herself in a magic land where she stays, as