[12] Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iii, p. 47.
[13] Literally "Nierensteiner,"—a wine not much known in England, and scarcely—according to our experience—worth the regrets of its respectable owner.
[14] In Schiller the eight long lines that conclude each stanza of this charming love-poem, instead of rhyming alternately as in the translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan—six lines rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet. In other respects the translation, it is hoped, is sufficiently close and literal.
[15] The peach.
[16] Sung in "The Parasite," a comedy which Schiller translated from Picard—much the best comedy, by the way, that Picard ever wrote.
[17] The idea diffused by the translator through this and the preceding stanza is more forcibly condensed by Schiller in four lines.
[18] "And ere a man hath power to say, "behold,"
The jaws of Darkness do devour it up,
So quick bright things come to confusion."—
SHAKESPEARE.
[19] The three following ballads, in which Switzerland is the scene, betray their origin in Schiller's studies for the drama of William Tell.
[20] The avalanche—the equivoque of the original, turning on the Swiss word Lawine, it is impossible to render intelligible to the English reader. The giants in the preceding line are the rocks that overhang the pass which winds now to the right, now to the left, of a roaring stream.
[21] The Devil's Bridge. The Land of Delight (called in Tell "a serene valley of joy") to which the dreary portal (in Tell the black rock gate) leads, is the Urse Vale. The four rivers, in the next stanza, are the Reus, the Rhine, the Tessin, and the Rhone.