ney and Settlement South 102

The Empire of Montezuma 105

The Landing of the Spaniards 116

Arrival of the Spaniards at Mexico 125

Death of Montezuma 134

Conclusion 142

Malinche 151

The Harp of the West 181

ARGUMENT OF THE POEM.

From the moment of my earliest acquaintance with Colonial History, I
have felt all the pressure of a task laid upon me, tightening its grasp
as I reached maturer years; that of an attempt to rescue the Aztecs from
their letterless and mythical position in history, to the position which
their possibilities at least argue for them; and this feeling has been
far less the outgrowth of the enthusiasm awakened for the Aztecs, as the
indignation felt at the whole conduct of the Spanish Conquest.

Realizing the gravity of the task, I have been led to carefully weigh
and investigate the different theories advanced as to the origin of the
Aztecs, and to adopt the argument of the poem as the best ground on
which to unite the Sun Worship of the East with the Mythology of of the
West.

Reverently, and with a full realization of how great must ever be the
distance between the actual work and the ideal of my early inspiration,
I lay the gathered chaplet at the shrine of old Chapultepec, and only
regret that the fruiting should have fallen so far short of the promise
of its blooming.

To Hubert Howe Bancroft the living, and W. H. Prescott the dead,
differing as they do in some very material respects, yet essentially the
same in spirit, I wish to record my indebtedness for their admirable and
exhaustive works that have induced to a final effort the poem of which
this is prefatory.

Some years since, I found in an abridged history of the United States, a
brief outline that led me back to the Dispersal at Shinar (certainly a
safe location for a speculative beginning) for the origin of the Aztec
race.

It occurs to me now, with a shade of the ludicrous, that if safety were
the all-important thing in the premises, I might have gone back a step
farther to the figs and pomegranites of Eden, and prayed for the shade
of Adam to cover the exotic which I have humbly tried to rescue from
what seems to me to be an undeserved obscurity. The careful analogies
drawn between Egypt and the Aztecs by both