What is remarkable in the original text of this tale is the rudeness and crudeness of the language in which it is written, which is indeed so great that its real spirit or meaning might easily escape any one not familiar with such composition. But I believe that I have rendered it very faithfully. There seems to be that, however, in Bellosguardo which inspires every poet. Two of the most beautiful passages in English literature, one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and another by Hawthorne, describe the views seen from it. The castle itself is deeply impressed on my memory, for during the past nine months I have never once raised my eyes from the table where I write without beholding it in full view before me across the Arno, even as I behold it now. I cannot help observing that the mysterious sentiment which seized on the hero of this tale when he found his virgin relic, was marvellously like that which inspired Keats when he addressed his Ode to a Grecian Urn: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness! Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape?” That which I have here given is truly a leaf-fringed legend, for it is bordered with the petals of roses and embalmed with their perfume, and one which in the hands of a great master might have been made into a really beautiful poem. It came near a very gay rhymer at least in the Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose songs, which were a little more than free, and rather more loose than easy, were the delight and disgrace of his time. And yet I cannot help rejoicing to meet this magnificent patron of art and letters at so late a day in a purely popular tale. There are _men_ of beauty who are also a joy for ever, as well as things, and Lorenzo was one of them. It is worth noting that just as the fairy in this tale reveals to Lorenzo that Florence is threatened by enemies, just so it happened that unto Saint Zenobio, standing rapt in divine contemplation in his cavern, it was announced that the same city was about to be assailed by cruel barbarians, who, as Sigbert relates in his Chronicle of 407 A.D., were the two hundred thousand Goths led by Radagasio into Italy. But they were soon driven away by the Saint’s prayers and penitence. It would be curious if one legend had here passed into another: “So visions in a vision live again, And dreams in dreams are wondrously transfused; Gold turning into grey as clouds do change, And shifting hues as they assume new forms.”