such a height of fearful interest” that the company fully expected to see Wilhelm stalk into the parlour.[19] In his study of Shelley, Charles Middleton has remarked: “It is hinted, somewhat plausibly, that the Leonora of Bürgher first awakened his poetic faculty. A tale of such beauty and terror might well have kindled his lively imagination, but his earliest pieces, written about this time, and consisting only of a few ballads, are deficient in elegance and originality, and give no evidence whatever of the genius which soon after declared itself.”[20] To suggest, as Zeiger would have it,[21] that Lenore influenced the poem which in the romance St. Irvyne[22] Megalina inscribes on the wall of her prison, and which commences:
Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling
Rise on the night-rolling breast of the blast, …
is the merest ineptitude, since these verses are taken almost word for word from “Lachin y Gair” in Byron’s Hours of Idleness, and that had been published some four years previously.[23]
As I have elsewhere shown in some detail, Shelley’s two juvenile romances owe not only their inspiration but a great deal of their phrasing and noctivagations to Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: or The Moor, which appeared in 1806, and which, as the poet himself declares “quite enraptured” him.[24] It is a very remarkable circumstance that in spite of the extremely plain hint which might profitably have been taken from such poems as Die Braut von Korinth and Lenore the novelists of the Gothic school, soaked though they were in German literature, searching the earth and the depths of the earth for thrills and sensation of every kind, do not seem to have utilized the tradition of the Vampire. It is a puzzle indeed if we ask how it was that such writers as Monk Lewis, “Apollo’s sexton,” who would fain “make Parnassus a churchyard”;[25] and Charles Robert Maturin who, as he himself confessed, loved bells rung by viewless hands, daggers encrusted with long shed blood, treacherous doors behind still more treacherous tapestry, mad nuns, apparitions,[26] et hoc genus omne; the two lords of macabre romance, should neither of them have sent some hideous vampire ghost ravening through their sepulchral pages. In the Gothic romance
