Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/51

 More important is the description of her numerous readings during the year, in which Spencer's translation plays the important part. She writes to Miss Arden Dec. 17:

Thus, at least in certain quarters, did the sedate and serious English mind respond to the new romanticism.

Mr. Spencer's translation of Bürger was to receive one further flattering notice from an eminent woman. In her De l' Allemagne, when published a second time in 1813, Madame de Staël, in discussing Bürger in chapter xiii of the second part, says:

As this passage is not one marked for suppression by the Paris police when her first edition was allowed to go to press, Madame de Staël must have met Mr. Spencer's translation before her visit to London in the spring and summer of 1813, when she was so much feted by the society of the English capital. But Mr. Spencer was already somewhat known in French literary circles, for Delille makes allusion to him in his poem Les Jardins. In describing the