Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/60



Taylor's form of the couplet is,

This he also uses three times, in his fortieth, forty-ninth, and fifty-fifth stanzas, as Bürger had used the original a similar number of times.

On the other hand, Scott's originality is shown in one or two special instances. Except for a reference to "a perjured lover's fleeting heart" in stanza nine, he omits the cruel intimation of Leonora's mother, which makes Taylor's fourteenth stanza as follows:

In stanza fifty, too, Scott adds effectively to the horror of the situation. Completing Bürger's allusion to the gibbet, Scott puts in the "murderer in his chain," and then adds a new stanza, calling on the felon to follow.

In the corresponding passage Taylor omits all reference to the gibbet, and even changes Bürger's "lustiges gesindel" to "an airy crew":

The alteration by Scott is so effective that it was quoted by the Critical Review in its notice, with the following somewhat misleading comment:

The following image of the corpse coming down from the gibbet and joining the procession, which will be considered by some as striking, by others as ludicrous, has been left out, we think, by the other translators: