IV PREFACE.
for a very different occasion, will yet here apply: " Undine re- mains the first love, and this is felt only once !"
In those times of gloomy events for the poet's fatherland, wherein it sprang from out his spirit, not untinged, as it well might be, with many of his own peculiar sufferings, it assumed a hue of deep melancholy, which yet its subject miglit have also called forth amid the sunshine of brighter days. The eyes of a water-maiden must, according to her nature, beam bright with tears, although sometimes the wanton sports of aquatic nymphs, like luxuriant loop -plants on the banks of a rivulet, may juggle around the lovely child. Thus might the bleeding heart of the poet, with the pelican's faculty, have poured somewhat into his fiction, and so gained for it that abundant sympathy which it so heartily met with, both in and out of the German land.
And now, my darling child, go forth on thy renewed ap- pearance, accompanied by the gracious salutation of our exalted master Goethe, on sending thee back to a noble lady, after having replaced the worn-out binding of a library-copy by a new one : —
" Here one may see how men are fabricated Of passion only — conscience have they none; How ill have they the beauteous child entreated— Its dress almost from off its body gone ! In later time, howe'er, this luck befell me — The pious youth will envy me, I trow; You gave me, friend, the opportunity To clothe the lovely prize from top to toe."
[The author then goes on to mention the various languages into which " Undine" had been translated — French, Italian, English,' Russian, Polish.]
' " Let me not part with England (the author adds) without quoting the following judgment of Sir Walter Scott, the greatest master of the ro- mantic, properly so called, which Britain has ever produced: — ' Fouque's Undine or Naiade,' he says, after a hasty glance at the author's other romances, ' is ravishing. The sutTering of the heroine is a real one, though it be the suffering of a fantastic being.' "
To this Coleridge's judgment may be added: — "'Undine* is a most exquisite work. The character of the heroine, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful."— ra/j/tf-I'oM-, p. 83. To which is subjoined, in a note by the Editor: — "Mr. C.'s admiration of this romance was un- bounded. He said there was something here even beyond Scott — that his characters and conceptions were composed; by which I understood him to mean, that Baillie Nico' Jarvie, for instance, was made up of old parti- culars, and received its individuaUty fiom the author's power of fusion;
