Before we forsake the North, let us try "The King in Thule." We are unfortunate in having to follow in the wake of the hundred translators of Faust, some of whom (we may instance Lord Francis Egerton) have already rendered this ballad as perfectly as may be; nevertheless we shall give it, as Shakspeare says, "with a difference."
The King in Thule.
There was a king in Thule,
Was true till death I ween:
A vase he had of the ruddy gold,
The gift of his dying queen.
He never pass'd it from him—
At banquet 'twas his cup;
And still his eyes were fill'd with tears
Whene'er he took it up.
So when his end drew nearer,
He told his cities fair,
And all his wealth, except that cup,
He left unto his heir.
Once more he sate at royal board,
The knights around his knee,
Within the palace of his sires,
Hard by the roaring sea.
Up rose the brave old monarch,
And drank with feeble breath,
Then threw the sacred goblet down
Into the flood beneath.
He watch'd its tip reel round and dip,
Then settle in the main;
His eyes grew dim as it went down—
He never drank again.
We shall now venture on an extravaganza which might have been well illustrated by Hans Holbein. It is in the ultra-Germanic taste, such as in our earlier days, whilst yet the Teutonic alphabet was a mystery, we conceived to be the staple commodity of our neighbours. We shall never quarrel with a wholesome spice of superstition; but, really, Hoffmann, Apel, and their fantastic imitators, have done more to render their national literature ridiculous, than the greatest poets to redeem it. The following poem of Goethe is a strange piece of sarcasm directed against that school, and is none the worse, perhaps, that it somewhat out-herods Herod in its ghostly and grim solemnity. Like many other satires, too, it verges closely upon the serious. We back it against any production of M. G. Lewis.
The Dance of Death.
The warder look'd down at the depth of night
On the graves where the dead were sleeping,
And, clearly as day, was the pale moonlight
O'er the quiet churchyard creeping.
One after another the gravestones began
To heave and to open, and woman and man
Rose up in their ghastly apparel!
Ho—ho for the dance!—and the phantoms outsprung
In skeleton roundel advancing,
The rich and the poor, and the old and the young,
But the winding-sheets hinder'd their dancing.
No shame had these revellers wasted and grim,
So they shook off the cerements from body and limb,
And scatter'd them over the hillocks.
They crook'd their thighbones, and they shook their long shanks,
And wild was their reeling and limber;
And each bone as it crosses, it clinks and it clanks
Like the clapping of timber on timber.
The warder he laugh'd, though his laugh was not loud;
And the Fiend whisper'd to him—"Go, steal me the shroud
Of one of these skeleton dancers."
He has done it! and backward with terrified glance
To the sheltering door ran the warder;
As calm as before look'd the moon on the dance,
Which they footed in hideous order.
But one and another seceding at last,
Slipp'd on their white garments and onward they pass'd,
And the deeps of the churchyard were quiet.
Still, one of them stumbles and tumbles along,
And taps at each tomb that it seizes;
But 'tis none of its mates that has done it this wrong,
For it scents its grave-clothes in the breezes.
It shakes the tower gate, but that drives it away,
For 'twas nail'd o'er with crosses—a goodly array—
And well was it so for the warder!
It must have its shroud—it must have it betimes—
The quaint Gothic carving it catches,
And upwards from story to story it climbs
And scrambles with leaps and with snatches.
Now woe to the warder, poor sinner, betides!
Like a long-legged spider the skeleton strides
From buttress to buttress, still upward!
The warder he shook, and the warder grew pale,
And gladly the shroud would have yielded!
The ghost had its clutch on the last iron rail
Which the top of the watch-turret shielded.
When the moon was obscured by the rush of a cloud,
One! thunder'd the bell, and unswathed by a shroud,
Down went the gaunt skeleton crashing!
A very pleasant piece of poetry to translate at midnight, as we did it, with merely the assistance of a dying candle!