The legends of Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne, are very numerous and vary much from each other. The Orlando of Pulci has a very different history from the Orlando of Bojardo and Ariosto.
The legend of "Rolandseck and the Nonnenwerth," which has been adopted by Campbell, not Mrs. Hemans, and charmingly set to music by Mrs. Arkwright, is well known on the Rhine. There are two poems on the legend in Simrock's Rheinsagen (12mo., Bonn, 1841), one by the editor, and another by August Kopisch. They exactly accord with Campbell's poem.
The legend of Ritter Toggenburg resembles that of Roland in many particulars, but it is not the same, and it belongs to another locality, to Kloster Fischingen, and not to Nonnenwerth. "Roland the Brave" appears in all the later editions of Campbell's Poems. Simrock's Rheinsagen is one of the most delightful handbooks that any one can take through the romantic region which the poems (partly well selected by the editor, and partly as well written by himself) describe.
E. C. H.
The author of the beautiful lines which are quoted by your correspondent X. Y. Z., is Campbell, not Mrs. Hemans. The poet, in the fifth stanza of his ballad, tells how the unfortunate Roland, on finding that Hildegund had taken the veil, was accustomed to sit at his window, and "sad and oft" to look "on the mansion of his love below."
"There's yet one window of that pile,
Which he built above the nun's green isle;
Thence sad and oft look'd he
(When the chant and organ sounded slow)
On the mansion of his love below,