In the prologue to this edition the editor observes, that “in all his productions is seen an excellency of heart and an imagination truly poetical, enabling us to assert with Lista that he is a great poet, and one of the best of our day.” He adds, “the poems of Heredia have, in our judgement, the merit of a purity of language, which unfortunately begins to be unknown in Spain. They are of a kind equally apart from the monotony and servileness, ascribed perhaps with reason to the classicists, and from the extravagant aberration of those who affect to be called Romanticists, and believe they are so, because they despise all rules in their compositions, substituting words and phrases unknown to our better writers and poets.” The language of Heredia in his poems is by the concurrent opinion of all Spanish critics very pure, and even strangers can feel its simplicity and nature in connexion with the truly poetical thoughts they contain, free from all conceits or affectations. In his best original compositions, the sentiments expressed are generally of a tender and melancholy character, as might be expected from his history, of one banished from his country and family, while suffering from privations and ill-health, and at length sinking under a fatal disease. Like many other poets, he thus also writes most affectingly when dwelling on his own personal feelings, as if to verify the declaration of Shelley, that … most men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song. The ‘Lines to his Horse’ and ‘The Season of the Northers’ bear intrinsic evidence of their origin, and also the Ode entitled ‘Poesy.’ This one bears a strong resemblance in its general tone to the ‘Epistle to His Brother’ and the poem of ‘Sleep and Poetry’ by Keats, whose character and fate also were in some degree the same as his. They have the same sentiment, as conscious of fame awaiting them, common to all poets, but peculiarly to those of more sensitive temperament, the ‘non omnis moriar,’ the hope of immortality,-- Ἐλπίδ’ ἔχω κλέος εὑρέσθαι κεν ὑψηλὸν πρόσω.