This, of
course, is not to say that Heine borrowed from Loeben. Indeed, one of
the strongest proofs that Heine borrowed from Schreiber rather than
from Loeben is the clarity and brevity, ease and poetry of Schreiber's
saga as over against the obscurity and diffuseness, clumsiness and
woodenness of Loeben's saga,[89] the plot of which, so far as the
action is concerned, is as follows: Hugbert von Stahleck, the son of
the Palsgrave, falls in love with the Lorelei and rows out in the
night to her seat by the Rhine. In landing, he falls into the stream,
the Lorelei dives after him and brings him to the surface. The old
Palsgrave has, in the meanwhile, sent a knight and two servants to
capture the Lorelei. They climb the lofty rock and hang a stone around
the enchantress' neck, when she voluntarily leaps from the cliff into
the Rhine below and is drowned.
The one episode in Loeben not found in any of Schreiber's _Rheinsagen_
is the story of the castaway ring miraculously restored from the
stomach of the fish. This Loeben could have taken from "Magelone" by
Tieck, or "Polykrates" by Schiller, both of whom he revered as men and
with whose works he was thoroughly familiar.
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