, yet it was
probably the pathos with which it is coloured that granted it longevity,
causing it to be handed down from generation to generation long before
the advent of the printing-press.

Pathos, of course, figures largely in all folk-literature, and the story
of Count Siegfried is by no means the only tale of a touching nature
embodied in the early poetry of the Rhine, another similar work which
belongs to this category being a poem associated with Liebenstein and
Sterrenberg, two castles not far from each other. These places, so goes
the tale, once belonged to a nobleman who chanced to have as his ward
a young lady of singular loveliness. He had also two sons, of whom the
elder was heir to Liebenstein, while the younger was destined to inherit
Sterrenberg. These brothers were fast friends, and this partitioning of
the paternal estates never begot so much as an angry word between
them; but, alas! in an evil day they both fell in love with the same
woman--their father's ward. Such events have happened often, and usually
they have ended in bitter strife; but the elder of the young men was
of magnanimous temperament, and, convinced that the lady favoured the
other's advances more than his, he left him to woo and win her, and so
in due course it was announced that the younger brother and she were
affianced. Anon the date fixed for their nuptials drew near, but it
happened that, in the interim, the young knight of Sterrenberg had
become infected with a desire to join a crusade; and now, despite
the entreaties of his fiancee and his father, he mustered a troop of
men-at-arms, led them to join the Emperor Conrad at Frankfort, and set
off for the Holy Land. Year after year went by; still the warrior was
absent, and betimes his friends and relations began to lose all hope of
ever seeing him again, imagining that he must have fallen at the hands
of the infidel. Yet this suspicion was never actually confirmed, and the
elder brother, far from taking the advantage which the strange situation
offered, continued to eschew paying any addresses to his brother's
intended bride, and invariably treated her simply as a beloved sister.
Sometimes, no doubt, it occurred to him that he might win her yet;
but of a sudden his horizon was changed totally, and changed in a most
unexpected fashion. The rover came back! And lo! it was not merely
a tale of war that he brought with him, for it transpired that while
abroad he had proved false to hi