One only still staggers and stumbles along, The grave edges groping and feeling; 'Tis no brother ghost who has done him the wrong; Now his scent shows the place of concealing. The church-door he shakes, but his strength is represt; 'Tis well for the watcher the portals are blest By crosses resplendent protected. His shirt he must have, upon this he is bent, No time has he now for reflection; Each sculpture of Gothic some holding has lent, He scales and he climbs each projection. Dread vengeance o'ertakes him, 'tis up with the spy! From arch unto arch draws the skeleton nigh, Like lengthy-legged horrible spider. The watcher turns pale, and he trembles full sore, The shroud to return he beseeches; But a claw (it is done, he is living no more), A claw to the shroud barely reaches. The moonlight grows faint; it strikes one by the clock; A thunderclap burst with a terrible shock; To earth falls the skeleton shattered. It needed but small penetration to guess that Goethe had neither seen nor heard of the Provencal song. It seemed, therefore, certain that a version of the Shroud-theft must exist in Germany, or near it--an inference I found to be correct on consulting that excellent work, Goethe's _Gedichte erlaeutert von Heinrich Viehoff_ (Stuttgart, 1870). So far as the title and the incident of the dancing are concerned, Goethe apparently had recourse to a popular story given in Appel's _Book of Spectres_, where it is related how, when the guards of the tower looked out at midnight, they saw Master Willibert rise from his grave in the moonshine, seat himself on a high tombstone, and begin to perform on his pocket pipe. Then several other tombs opened, and the dead came forth and danced cheerily over the mounds of the graves. The white shrouds fluttered round their dried-up limbs, and their bones clattered and shook till the clock struck one, when each returned into his narrow house, and the piper put his pipe under his arm and followed their example. The part of the ballad which has to do directly with the Shroud-theft is based upon oral traditions collected by the poet during his sojourn at Teplitz, in Bohemia, in the summer of 1813. Viehoff has ascertained that there are also traces of the legend in Silesia, Moravia, and Tyrol. In these countries the story would seem to be oftenest told in prose; but Viehoff prints a rhymed rendering of the variant localised in Tyrol, where the events are supposed to have occurred at the village of Burgeis: The twelve night strokes have ceased to sound, The watchman of Burgeis looks around, The country all in moonlight sleeps; Standing the belfry tower beneath The tombstones, with their wreaths of death, The wan moon's ghastly pallor steeps.