As to Loeben's saga, there can be but little doubt that he derived his initial inspiration from Schreiber, with whom he became intimately acquainted[88] at Heidelberg during the winter of 1807-8. This, of course, is not to say that Heine borrowed from Loeben. Indeed, one of the strongest proofs that Heine borrowed from Schreiber rather than from Loeben is the clarity and brevity, ease and poetry of Schreiber's saga as over against the obscurity and diffuseness, clumsiness and woodenness of Loeben's saga,[89] the plot of which, so far as the action is concerned, is as follows: Hugbert von Stahleck, the son of the Palsgrave, falls in love with the Lorelei and rows out in the night to her seat by the Rhine. In landing, he falls into the stream, the Lorelei dives after him and brings him to the surface. The old Palsgrave has, in the meanwhile, sent a knight and two servants to capture the Lorelei. They climb the lofty rock and hang a stone around the enchantress' neck, when she voluntarily leaps from the cliff into the Rhine below and is drowned. The one episode in Loeben not found in any of Schreiber's _Rheinsagen_ is the story of the castaway ring miraculously restored from the stomach of the fish. This Loeben could have taken from "Magelone" by Tieck, or "Polykrates" by Schiller, both of whom he revered as men and with whose works he was thoroughly familiar. But there is nothing in Loeben that Heine could not have derived in more inspiring form from Schreiber; and Schreiber contains essentials not in Loeben at all. Indeed, a general study of Schreiber's manuals leads one to believe that the influence of them, as a whole, on Heine would be a most grateful theme: there is not one Germanic legend referred to in Heine that is not contained in Schreiber. And as a prose writer, Heine's fame rests largely on his travel pictures.[90] The points of similarity between Loeben's ballad and saga and the ballads and Märchen of Brentano, all of which Loeben knew in 1821, are wholly negligible. It remains,[91] therefore, simply to point out some of the peculiarities of Brentano's "Loreley" as protrayed in the _Rheinmärchen_--peculiarities that are interesting in themselves and that may have played a part in the development of the legend since 1846.