Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/41

 The change to which Taylor himself called special attention in his preface was that in the thirty-fourth stanza of the first version, the thirty-third of the second. Here, as he says, he made a change suggested by a line in Spencer's version. The last couplet of Taylor's first form read:

Spencer had rendered these lines:

The last line is closer to the original than Taylor's earlier version, and it suggested an advantageous change. With the other changes made necessary by this adoption the whole stanza was altered into:

Finally, Taylor's second version bore an altered title, as shown above. This the translator explains as follows in a note, when reprinting in the Historic Survey (II, 40): "The German title is Lenore, which is the vernacular form of Eleonora, a name here represented by Ellenore." This change was perhaps less fortunate than most of the others made in the second form of the translation.

Taylor's second version came out so near the end of the year 1796, that it was not noticed until the February number of the Monthly Review. Then, however, it was given high praise in the following terms: