Noch träum' ich Träume, doch sie theilt kein Herzr
Allein mit der Natur und meinem Schmerz,
—Kommt Freude mir, bricht Leid herein:
Ich trag's allein.
The Flower of the Lauenburg.
Broken walls of the grey, long-past centuries, on the wooded mountains, a dilapidated tower, moats overgrown with wild thorns, a few dark and gloomy vaults, and half-fallen windows and arches—those are the small remains of the most magnificent of the former castles of the Harz mountains, the ruins of the ancient seat of the Counts-palatine, the Lauenburg.
In former days the spot lay much more desolate than now; the old ways and the delicious wood-paths had not been opened up.
Heaps of rubbish and shapeless ruins lay scattered everywhere; scarcely could the wanderer break his way through the creepers of the common virgin's bower, and the prickles of the buckthorn over the moss-grown walls, to the broken tower.
But the young people of Dorf Steckelnberg, at the foot of the lower adjacent mountain, on which lie the ruins of Schloss Steckelnburg, found their way easier; it was just the wild and savage character of the place that attracted them, and it was very seldom that a troop of merry boys did not choose the lonely ruins as the scene of their games, and even timorous maidens ventured to approach the haunted walls in their search after berries and wild-flowers.
Once, more than a hundred years ago, on St. John's Day, a number of children from Steckelnberg were scattered in the thickets around the ruins gathering flowers and making wreaths and garlands, when suddenly one of the boys uttered a cry of astonishment.
The others ran to him, and lo! there stood on the edge of the tower walls, then rising only the height of a man from the débris, a wonderful flower, the like of which the children had never seen before.
It looked so strange, and still seemed to gaze so mildly and confidentially in the eyes of the children, that they all at once fancied something supernatural in the flower.