Gods, Saints, & Men

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From the PREFACE.
THE stories treated in the following Poems have been obtained from various sources. One or two only can be found in books; the others have been picked up in conversation, or suggested by a mere word or a mere picture; thus the "Ring of St. Mark" was suggested by Giorgione's Storm in the Academy of Venice, the "Emperor on the Ledge" by the Martinswand near Innsbruck; while "the Death of the Duchess Isabella" is a development of a scene in Webster's "White Devil;" the "Fiddle and the Slipper" embodies a mediaeval legend which has wandered all over the continent, and which, first heard many years ago, with reference to a shrine in the Rhineland, and subsequently as a legend of Burgos Cathedral, I met last autumn in the rough ballads hawked about the town of Lucca on the festival of the Holy Face, and yet again in a half effaced giottesque fresco recently sawed from the wall of a Veronese palace. The "Rhyme of the Reeds" is a fragment of an Italian fairy tale of which I have forgotten the remainder: while " the Witness," the "Keys of the Convent" and the "Ride of Don Pedro," were told me by a friend from Granada. The "Last Love of Venus" is my own development of one of the legends of the Tannhauser cycle collected or invented by Heinrich Heine; and the "Rival of Fallopius" is my own conception of a scene which may more than once have taken place in the sixteenth century, and which certain philanthropical men of science may perhaps regret not to see repeated in the nineteenth.
-E. L. H.