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His connection with, and influence upon, the Dresden group of romanticists, including Tieck, is a matter of record, and Fouqué looked upon him as a poet of uncommon ability. But let no one on this account believe that Loeben was a great poet and that the silence concerning him is therefore grimly unjust.

It is therefore reasonable to believe that Heine helped Brentano to metamorphose his Lorelei of the ballad, where she is wholly human, into the superhuman Lorelei of the Rheinmärchen where she does, as a matter of fact, comb her hair with a golden comb. And now as to Loeben: Did Heine know and borrow from his ballad?

And this is true despite the fact that Loeben was an exceedingly prolific writer and a very popular and influential man in. his day.

It is an old story, and Heine could have derived his material from a number of places, but not from Grimm's Deutsche Sagen, indeed from no place so convenient as Schreiber. Heine knew Schreiber's Handbuch in 1823. The situation, then, is as follows: Heine had to have a source or sources, There are three candidates for Heine honors; Brentano, Loeben, Schreiber.

Goethe, whether he made the foregoing remark or not, at least received Loeben kindly; but he received others in the same way who were not poets at all. Eichendorff said: "Loeben. Wunderbar poetische Natur in stiller Verklärung." But Eichendorff was then only nineteen years old, and he later took this back.

Uhland praised these same poems; but he reminded Loeben in no uncertain terms, that the chief characteristic of southern poetry was "Phantasie," while that of the northern poets was "Gemüth," and that the attempt to revive the spirit of Guarini, Cervantes, and their kind was not well taken.

And as to her personal appearance, Brentano and Loeben simply tell us that she was beautiful, Brentano employing the Homeric method of proving her beauty by its effects. Heine and Schreiber not only comment upon her physical beauty, they also tell us how she enhanced her natural charms by zealously attending to her hair and her jewelry and religiously guarding the color scheme in so doing.

The expression "ein Graf Löben" is grammatical evidence, though not proof, of one of two things: that Loeben was to Elster himself in 1890 a mere name, or that Elster knew Loeben would be this to the readers of his edition of Heine's works. Brandes says: "Die Nachahmung ist unzweifelhaft."

And, moreover, literary parallels are the ancestors of that undocile child, Conjecture. and so on. And as to the pronounced similarity of form, we must remember that Heine was here employing his favorite measure, while Loeben was almost the equal of Ruckert in regard to the number of verse and strophe forms he effectively and easily controlled.

And as a prose writer, Heine's fame rests largely on his travel pictures. The points of similarity between Loeben's ballad and saga and the ballads and Märchen of Brentano, all of which Loeben knew in 1821, are wholly negligible.