



Produced by Andrea Ball, Christine Bell & Marc D'Hooghe
at http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously
made available by the Internet Archive)





ARIADNE IN MANTUA

A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS

BY

VERNON LEE


Portland, Maine

THOMAS B. MOSHER

MDCCCCXII




TO

ETHEL SMYTH

THANKING, AND BEGGING, HER FOR MUSIC




PREFACE


Ariadne _in Mantua_, _A Romance in Five Acts, by Vernon Lee.
Oxford: B.H. Blackwell 50 and 51 Broad Street. London:
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company. A.D. MCMIII.
Octavo. Pp. x: 11-66_.


Like almost everything else written by Vernon Lee there is to
be found that insistent little touch which is her sign-manual
when dealing with Italy or its makers of forgotten melodies.
In other words, the music of her rhythmic prose is summed up
in one poignant vocable--_Forlorn_.

As for her vanished world of dear dead women and their lovers
who are dust, we may indeed for a brief hour enter that
enchanted atmosphere. Then a vapour arises as out of long lost
lagoons, and, be it Venice or Mantua, we come to feel "how
deep an abyss separates us--and how many faint and nameless
ghosts crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us by
the past."

T.B.M.




PREFACE


_"Alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichniss"_


_It is in order to give others the pleasure of reading or
re-reading a small masterpiece, that I mention the likelihood
of the catastrophe of my_ Ariadne _having been suggested