The Lorelei and Other Songs of the Water

She sits on the rock, combing her golden hair, and sings-and the boatman, listening, is taken by the water. From the Rhine where the Lorelei lures the helmsman to wreck, to the wide North Sea of storm and calm, of gods and drowned men, Heinrich Heine's water poems gather here in one current. The Lorelei leads them; around her rise the water nymphs about a sleeping knight, the fisher-maiden on the moonlit strand, and the great sea-cycles of The North Sea-Poseidon, the song of the Oceanides, the ocean spectre, and the long way home to harbour. Heine (1797-1856), the last of the German Romantics, wrote songs so wholly the people's that The Lorelei outlived even the burning of his books. This Lightbound Library volume gathers his water-spirit verse in Edgar Alfred Bowring's faithful Victorian translation, behind an original painting by Jessica von Braun.