Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/43

 comparison. A Collection of Old Ballads, corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant (the third edition), London, 1727, published by J. Roberts, Warrick-lane; 287 pages—is quoted more than once in Percy's Reliques. It contains 44 poems: among them occurs, p. 226, the following tale, which, it is thought, bears a considerable resemblance to Lenore, and must have suggested the first hint of the fable.

He then gives the whole, as it may be found with two or three slight variations in Child's Ballads, volume nine.

Apart from these more important notes he explains bride in the fifth stanza as following the German use for a betrothed woman, and "twirled at the pin" of stanza twenty-four as from Percy's Ballads, not Bürger. He adds that he could not render Bürger's phrase satisfactorily.

The publication of Stanley's Leonora not only resulted in the speedy issue of William Taylor's first version of the poem, but also in a new translation by Henry James Pye, the poet laureate. That Mr. Stanley's first version was primarily in Pye's mind is clear from the first paragraph of the Advertisement which preceded it:

The reference to the "free paraphrase" "already published" must be to Stanley's version, and to his use of "freely translated" on his title-page. The allusion to "a promised translation of the same tale by the pen of a young poet of illustrious birth" is as clearly to the version of Mr. Spencer, thus indicated as already announced. Besides, the purpose to make a more literal translation than the "free paraphrase," "a translation line by line," would indicate that Pye was primarily influenced by Stanley's effort. Was that alone responsible for Pye's poem?

It would seem so but for a statement in the Dictionary of National Biography, which must be examined. In the article on