Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/66

 Incidentally there should here be mentioned another edition of Scott's William and Helen, especially because of indirect consequences in Scott's life. In 1799, on a visit to Rosebank, James Ballantyne called upon Scott, and the latter suggested Ballantyne's printing of books along with his newspaper. Scott said:

This second printing of Scott's William and Helen is now one of the rarest of books. Yet it was to have an indirect effect upon Scott's whole after life, thus linking inextricably, though so disastrously, his earliest with his latest endeavors as a literary artist.

It is needless to say that Scott was the only one of these five translators of Bürger's Lenore to attain considerable fame as a poet, and even he withdrew from the poetic field as he began to succeed in prose fiction. Nor can it be said that this, his first poem to be printed, greatly encouraged him to give his life to writing verse. It was nine years before The Lay of the Last Minstrel delighted English readers. Yet the flattering reception of William and Helen by his friends, and the interviews with the popular author of The Monk, indirectly resulting from it, clearly had their influence on the shy Scotch advocate, the Sir Walter Scott who was to be.

We are now in a position to understand in detail the reason why the German tributary to English romanticism, as Professor Beers calls it, overflowed in five translations and seven versions of Bürger's Lenore during the single year 1796. The interest in Bürger, at least on the part of several, was clearly earlier than that year. William Taylor and Mr. J. T. Stanley had come to appreciate German literature from residence in Germany as early as