As to length,
the two poems are exactly equal, each containing, by an unimportant
but interesting coincidence, precisely 117 words.[56] But the contents
of the two poems are not nearly so similar as they apparently seemed,
at first blush, to Adolf Strodtmann. The melodious singing, the golden
hair and the golden comb and the use that is made of both, the
irresistibly sweet sadness, the time, "Aus alten Zeiten," and the
subjectivity--Heine himself recites his poem--these indispensable
essentials in Heine's poem are not in Loeben's. Indeed as to content
and of course as to merit, the two poems are far removed from each
other.
And, moreover, literary parallels are the ancestors of that undocile
child, Conjecture. We must remember that sirenic and echo poetry are
almost as old as the tide of the sea, certainly as old as the hills,
while as to the general situation, there is a passage in Milton's
_Comus_ (ll. 880-84) analogous to Heine's ballad, as follows:
And fair Ligea's golden comb,
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks,
Sleeking her soft alluring locks,
By all the nymphs that nightly dance
Upon thy streams with wily glance,
and so on.
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