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For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more, does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams 'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance' and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded.
The oldest form of the word is found in the Codex Annales Fuldenses, which goes back to the year 858, and was first applied to the region around the modern Kempten near Bingen. "Lei" means a rock; "Loreley" means then "Elbfels." And what Brentano and his followers have done is to apply the name of a place to a person.
It was a great achievement, and since Biddy could not, for the moment, produce any mythological terror in the nature of a Loreley better than a pike that preyed on swimmers, Gabrielle would often go down to the lake secretly in the middle of a summer morning, and strip off her clothes and float on her back in the sunshine.
By many she is said to have built the most beautiful of the Pyramids, the Pyramid of Mycerinus or Menkera. One tale related of her and reported by Strabo and AElian probably gave rise to our oldest and most beautiful fairy tale, Cinderella; another is near akin to the Loreley legend.
In "Das Märchen von dem Rhein und dem Müller Radlauf," Loreley is portrayed in a sevenfold capacity, as it were: seven archways lead to seven doors that open onto seven stairways that lead to a large hall in which Frau Lureley sits on a sevenfold throne with seven crowns upon her head and her seven daughters around her.
Powell smiled pleasantly, and pressed the offered hand; but the eyes, blue and cold as the stalactites of Capri, scanned the orphan's countenance, and when Edna had seen fully into their depths, she could not avoid recalling Heine's poem of Loreley. "My daughter Gertrude promises herself much pleasure in your society, Miss Earl; for uncle's praises prepare her to expect a most charming companion.
After returning to Germany he was soon busily employed in recasting some portions of "Elijah" with which he was not satisfied; he had also another oratorio on even a grander scale, "Christus," already commenced; and at last, after all his life-long seeking in vain for a good libretto for an opera, he had begun to set one written by Geibel, the German poet, "Loreley," to music.
He hung upon her smiles, drank her words and could hardly restrain himself in her presence. No shipwrecked mariner ever more greedily devoured with his dazzled eyes the fateful loreley of a rocky, deserted coast than he did her.
Pray that she may not seize you, this mighty "Loreley" of the heights, this evil-genius from the land of the sylphides; she whizzes around her prey, and whirls it into the abyss. She sits on the narrow rocky path, close by the steep declivity, where no tree, no branch is found, where the wanderer must creep close to the side of the rock, and look steadily forward.
"Still, still you know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference. Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure."
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