And lo! beneath a linden-tree, there sits a lady fair,
     But like some savage maiden clad in sylvan pageant rare. 
     Her kirtle’s of the dappled skin of the rapid mountain roe;
     A quiver at her back she bears, beside her lies a bow;
     Her feet are bare, her golden hair adown her shoulders streams,
     And in her lap a rosy child is smiling in its dreams.

The count had never thought to see his wife again.  He imagined that she had long since starved to death or been devoured; and now, finding her alive, his pulses quicken.  He knows well that only a miracle could have preserved her during all this period of estrangement, and reflects that on behalf of the virtuous alone are miracles worked.  Seeing herein ample proof of Genofeva’s innocence, he welcomes her back to his arms and with beating heart bears her to the castle: 

     Oh! there was joy in Andernach upon that happy night: 
     The palace rang with revelry, the city blazed with light: 
     And when the moon her paler beams upon the turrets shed,
     Above the Roman gate was seen the traitor Golo’s head.

The Brothers

Doubtless it was the thaumaturgic element in this pretty romance which chiefly made it popular among its pristine audiences, yet it was probably the pathos with which it is coloured that granted it longevity, causing it to be handed down from generation to generation long before the advent of the printing-press.

Pathos, of course, figures largely in all folk-literature, and the story of Count Siegfried is by no means the only tale of a touching nature embodied in the early poetry of the Rhine, another similar work which belongs to this category being a poem associated with Liebenstein and Sterrenberg, two castles not far from each other.  These places, so goes the tale, once belonged to a nobleman who chanced to have as his ward a young lady of singular loveliness.  He had also two sons, of whom the elder was heir to Liebenstein, while the younger was destined to inherit Sterrenberg.  These brothers were fast friends, and this partitioning of the paternal estates never begot so much as an angry word between them; but, alas! in an evil day they both fell in love with the same woman—­their father’s ward.  Such events have happened often, and usually they have ended in bitter strife; but the elder of the young men was of magnanimous temperament, and, convinced that the lady favoured the other’s advances more than his, he left him to woo and win her, and so in due course it was announced that the younger brother and she were affianced.  Anon the date fixed for their nuptials drew near, but it happened that, in the interim, the young knight of Sterrenberg had become infected with a desire to join a crusade; and now, despite the entreaties of his fiancee and his father, he mustered a troop of men-at-arms, led them to join the Emperor Conrad at Frankfort, and set off for the Holy Land.  Year