a tournament in Nürnberg largely to the beauty and agility of his great white horse Bellerophon. Siegenot von der Aue had seen him and his horse perform and determined to obtain Bellerophon, if possible, for, owing to a curse pronounced on his family by a remote ancestor, Siegenot must either win at the next tournament or become a monk, which he does not wish to do. Both he and Otto love Felicitas, the niece of Graf Berthald. Siegenot secures Bellerophon, is victorious at the tournament, though seriously wounded, and is nursed back to health by Otto and Felicitas. It is Otto, however, who wins Felicitas through his chivalric treatment of his rival. The two are married, while Siegenot rides away on the great white horse Bellerophon.

It is such creations that make us turn away from Loeben. Alas for German romanticism if this story were wholly typical of it! It contains the traditional conceits of the orthodox romanticists, but applied in such a sweet, lovely, pretty fashion! One woman is placed between two men, for in that way Loeben could best bring out his philosophy of friendship. The only change, it seems, that he ever made in this arrangement was to place one man between two women. The sick-bed is poetized as the cradle of knowledge, for in it, or on it, we become introspective and learn life. Old chronicles, tournaments, jewelry, precious stones, Maryism, nature from every conceivable point of view, dreams and premonitions, visions and hallucinations, religion of the renunciatory type, the pain that clarifies, the friendship that weeps, Catholic painting and lute music, and love—human and divine—these are the main themes in this tale. Lyrics and episodic stories are interpolated, obsolete words and stylistic archaisms occur. In short, the novelette reads like an amalgamation of Novalis without his philosophy, Waekenroder without his suggestiveness, and Tieck without his constructive ability.

The story[21] entitled Leda is again typical of Loeben. Briefly stated, the plot is as follows: Leda, the daughter of a Roman duke, loves Cephalo, who is a gentleman but not a nobleman, and is loved by him. Her father, however, has forced her to become engaged to Alberto, a man of high degree, whom she does not love. The wedding is imminent, and Leda is sorely perplexed. Her father does not know why she is so indifferent to the approaching event and accordingly sends her to a distant and lonely castle in the hope that she may become interested, at least, in her own nuptials. While there she drowns herself in the swan lake. Alberto drops out of the story, and Cephalo becomes the intimate friend of the duke. Previous to this Alberto had ordered a certain painter to paint a picture of "Leda and the Swan." Danae, the daughter of an old, unscrupulous antiquarian, was seen by Cephalo while posing as a model for Leda. Enraged at this, she tells her father that she will not be appeased until married to Cephalo. But she loses her life through the falling of an old, dilapidated castle wherein she has been keeping an unconventional tryst, and Cephalo becomes the intimate friend of the painter.

Loeben's ideas and technique stand out in every line of this story. One woman is placed between two men, unexpected friendships are developed, the lute and the zither are played in the moonlight, love and longing abound, nature is made a confidant, der Zaubern der Kunst is overdone, familiar stories—Leda and the Swan, Actaeon and Danae—are interwoven, there are manifest reminiscences of Emilia Galotti and Ofterdingen, and the prose is uncommonly fluent. The only character in the entire narrative who has any virility is the antiquarian, and he is one of the meanest Loeben ever drew. Alberto has no will at all, Leda not much, Cephalo less than Leda, and Danae is without character. In short, the only valuable, part of the story lies in its approach to a development of the psychology of love in art. But it is only an approach; and it does not make one feel inclined to read a vast deal more of the prose works of Graf von Loeben.

As to Loeben's lyrics,[22] they are irregular, inconsistent, and odd as to orthography,[23] melodious and flowing in form, poor in ideas, rich in feeling that frequently sounds forced, representative of nearly all the important Germanic, Romance, and Oriental verse and strophe forms, reminiscent of his reading[24] in many instances, and romantic as a whole, especially in their constant portrayal of longing. Loeben was the poet of Sehnsucht. He tried always das Nahe zu entfernen und das Ferne sich nahe zu bringen. With a few conspicuous exceptions, his lyrics resemble those of Geibel somewhat in form and treatment. Poetry and individual poets receive grateful consideration, the seasons are overworked, love rarely fails and nature never, wine and the Rhine are not forgotten, and the South is poetized as the land of undying inspiration. Of their kind, and in their way, Loeben's poems are nearly perfect.[25] There are no expressions that repel, no verses that jar, no poems that wholly lack fancy, and there are occasional evidences of the inspiration that rebounds. It would be presumptuous to ask for a more amiable poem than "Frühlingstrost" (46), or for a neater one than "Der Nichterhörte" (121), or for a more gently roguish one than the triolett[26] entitled "Frage" (55).

But be his poems never so good, there is no reason why Loeben should be revived for the general reader. His prose works lack artistic measure and objective plausibility; his lyrics lack clarity and virility; his creations in general lack the story-telling property that holds attention and the human-interest touches that move the soul. His thirty-nine years were too empty of real experience;[27] his works are not filled with the matter that endures. And it is for this reason that they ceased to live after their author had died. His connection with this earth was always just at the snapping-point. His works constitute, in many instances, a poetic rearrangement of what he had just latterly read. And when he is original he is vacuous. To emphasize his works for their own sake would consequently be to set up false values. Loeben can be studied with profit only by those people who believe that great poets can be better understood and appreciated by a study of the literary than by a study of the economic background. To know Loeben[28] throws light on some of his much greater contemporaries—Goethe, Eichendorff, Kleist, Novalis, Arnim, Brentano, Uhland, Görres, Tieck, and possibly Heine.

II

But it is not so much the purpose of this paper to evaluate Loeben's creations as to locate him in the development of the Lorelei-legend, and to prove, or disprove, Heine's indebtedness to him in the case of his own poem of like name. The facts are these:

In 1801 Clemens Brentano published at Bremen the first volume of his __Godwi_ and in 1802 the second volume at the same place.[29] He had finished the novel early in 1799—he was then twenty-one years old. Wieland was instrumental in securing a publisher.[30] Near the close of the second volume, Violette sings the song beginning:

    Zu Bacharach am Rheine
    Wohnt eine Zauberin.

That this now well-known ballad of the Lorelei was invented by Brentano is proved, not so much by his own statement to that effect as by the fact that the erudite and diligent Grimm brothers, the friends of Brentano, did not include the Lorelei-legend in their collection of 579 Deutsche Sagen, 1816. The name of his heroine Brentano took from the famous echo-rock near St. Goar, with which locality he became thoroughly familiar during the years 1780-89. No romanticist knew the Rhine better or loved it more than Brentano. "Lore" means[31] a small, squinting elf; and is connected with the verb "lauern." The oldest form of the word is found in the