Albrecht

Sô gesach sie valken vliegen. Dietmar von Aist.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1890.
Copyright, 1890 , By Arlo Bates.
University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
To THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER , NIRAN BATES, AND OF MY MOTHER , SUSAN THAXTER BATES,
I Dedicate this Book;
profoundly conscious that it can bring to me no other satisfaction or honor so great as the keeping in remembrance the fact that I am their son .
It must be evident to the most careless observer that the treatment of the theme with which the present story deals would probably not have taken the form it has, had Undine not been written before it; but it is to be hoped that Albrecht will not on that account be set down as an attempt either to imitate or to rival that immortal romance.
No effort has been made to secure historical exactness, as the intent of the tale was wholly independent of this. To furnish a picture of the times was not in the least the thing sought.
A romance can hardly fall into a more fatal error than to attempt the didactic, and there is no intention in the present story of enforcing any moral whatever; and yet the problem which lies at the heart of the tale is one which is of sufficient significance in human life to furnish a reasonable excuse for any book which, even without contributing anything to its solution, states it so that it appeals to the reader until he recognizes its deep import.
Like a vast sea the mighty Schwarzwald stretched its forests of pine and its wide wastes of heather around Castle Rittenberg, its surface forever fretted into waves by the wind. Like the sea it seemed measureless, and the lands which lay beyond its borders appeared to the scattered dwellers in its valleys as remote as might appear the continents to the people of far islands.
Like the sea, moreover, the Schwarzwald was peopled by strange beings, of whom alike the peasant folk who dwelt upon its borders, the rude churls whose huts stood here and there in clusters in its less intractable nooks, and the nobles whose castles overtopped the wilderness of trees and bracken, went always in secret dread. In the north lurked the hordes of the Huns, the terrible barbarians who from time to time descended, hardly human, upon the fertile lands which lay beyond the borders of the forest, swarming as they went upon whatever luckless castle lay in their path. The boldest knight might well tremble at the name of the ferocious Huns, and even the army of Charlemagne himself had hardly been able to cope with this foe.