The English lines here quoted are from Taylor's version, though with a slight change in the last, doubtless due to imperfect memory.
Southey also had read the Bürger translations of Taylor, though he seems to have preferred the second in the Monthly Magazine, The Lass of Fair Wone, to the Lenora. He writes to Bedford, July 31, 1796:
Lenora is partly borrowed from an old English ballad—
Is there any room at your feet?[quotes six lines more.]
But the other ballad of Bürger, in the Monthly Magazine, is most excellent. I know no commendation equal to its merit; read it again, Grosvenor, and read it aloud. The man who wrote that should have been ashamed of Lenora. Who is this Taylor? I suspected they were by Sayers.[2]
Some years later Southey seems to have felt a higher regard for Taylor's Lenora. He had come to know who Taylor was, and was now in correspondence with him. On May 30, 1799, he writes:
Lewis, the Monk-man, is about to publish a compilation of ballads, a superb quarto I understand, with prints. He has applied to me for some of mine, and to some person who had translated 'Lenore,' and to whom your translation had been attributed; so that instead of yours he has hampered himself with a very inferior one. I suppose he will get rid of it and request yours.[3]
Taylor's answer to Southey perhaps indicates something of the chagrin he may rightly have felt at the preference shown for another version less excellent than his own. He wrote on June 23, "Of Mr. Lewis I have heard nothing, and conclude that he prefers to associate with Mr. Spencer's rank and style in poetry."[4] Lewis did finally print Taylor's first version, though with no hint of the author. He gives the translation high praise, however, in his prefatory note:
This version of Bürger's well-known ballad was published in the Monthly Magazine, and I consider it as a masterpiece of translation. Indeed, as far as my opinion goes, the English ballad is, in
- ↑ Robberds, Life, I, 319. In Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal for the year 1798, the record for Oct. 2 reads: "Bought Burgher's poems, the price 6 marks." Coleridge later quotes Wordsworth again: "As to Bürger, I am far from that admiration of him which he has excited in you; but I am slow to admire, and I am not yet sufficiently master of the language to understand him perfectly."
- ↑ Life and Correspondence of Southey, I, 286.
- ↑ Robberds, Life, I, 279 f. Lewis's "compilation of ballads" was of course the Tales of Wonder, printed in 1801.
- ↑ Robberds, Life, I, 283.
