Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash, splash! along the sea:
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.
[From Taylor's "Lenora.">[
Look up, look up, an airy crewe
In roundel dances reele.
The moone is bryghte and blue the night,
May'st dimly see them wheel.[24]
"Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe,
Come to and follow me.
And daunce for us the wedding daunce
When we in bed shall be."
And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew
Come wheeling o'er their heads,
All rustling like the withered leaves
That wyde the whirlwind spreads.
Halloo! halloo! Away they goe
Unheeding wet or drye,
And horse and rider snort and blowe,
And sparkling pebbles flye.
And all that in the moonshine lay
Behynde them fled afar;
And backward scudded overhead
The skye and every star.
Tramp, tramp across the land they speede,
Splash, splash across the sea:
"Hurrah! the dead can ride apace,
Dost fear to ride with me?"
It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr. Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There is no mention of the sea in Bürger, whose hero is killed in the battle of Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Bürger's poem was written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and, indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German." Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Bürger's next most popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of "The Lass of Fair Wone."
Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his translations and critical papers in the Monthly Magazine and Monthly Review, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England. When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England. "When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin, "there was probably no English translation of any German author but through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Bürger in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora" he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30 he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27]