Buerger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained
perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Goettingen in
Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of
Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who
came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her
off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they
ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to
a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops
from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within,
and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and
her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to
some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are
clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened;
was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost
really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed,
with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient
Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and
the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs
whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer
form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives
common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet
William's Ghost," as an English example of the class.

Scott's friends assured him that his translation was superior to
Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his
appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer."
But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness
and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished
rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the _Grobheit_, the
rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will
illustrate the difference:

[From Scott's "William and Helen."]

"Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:--
Dost fear to ride with me?
Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"--
"O William, let them be!"

"See there! see there! What yonder swings
And creaks 'mid whistling rain?"
"Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel;
A murd'rer in his chain.

"Halloa! Thou felon,