1823. His contention, however, that Heine borrowed from Schreiber[63]
has everything in its favor, from the point of view of both external
and internal evidence and deserves, therefore, detailed elaboration.

As to internal evidence, there is only one slight difference between
Heine's ballad and Schreiber's saga: where Heine's Lorelei combs her
hair with a golden comb and has golden jewelry, Schreiber's "bindet
einen Kranz für ihre goldenen Locken" and "hat eine Schnur von
Bernstein in der Hand." Even here the color scheme is the same;
otherwise there is no difference: time, place, and events are
precisely the same in both. The mood and style are especially similar.
The only words in Heine not found in Schreiber are "Kamm" and
"bedeuten." Schreiber goes, to be sure, farther than does Heine: he
continues the story after the death of the hero.[64] This, however, is
of no significance, for Heine was simply interested in his favorite
theme of unrequited or hindered love.

Now Heine must have derived his plot from somewhere, else this would
be an uncanny case of coincidence. And the two expressions, "Aus alten
Zeiten," and "Mit ihrem Singen," the latter of which is so important,
Heine could have derived only from Schreiber. Heine was not jesting
when he said it was a fairy tale from the days of old; he was
following, it seems, Schreiber's saga, the first sentence of which
reads as follows: "In alten Zeiten liess sich manchmal auf dem Lureloy
um die Abenddämmerung und beym Mondschein eine Jungfrau sehen, die mit
so anmuthiger Stimme sang, dass alle, die es hörten, davon bezaubert
wurden." But Brentano's Lorelei does not sing at all, and Loeben's
just a little, "Sie singt dir hold zum Ohre," while Heine, like
Schreiber, puts his heroine in the prima donna class, and has her work
her charms through her singing. And it seems that Heine was following