Ariadne in Mantua: A Romance in Five Acts

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.
Alles Vergängliche 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 by the late Mr. Shorthouse's Little Schoolmaster Mark; but I must ask forgiveness of my dear old friend, Madame Emile Duclaux (Mary Robinson), for unwarranted use of one of the songs of her Italian Garden.
For a couple of years after writing those pages, the image of the Palace of Mantua and the lakes it steeps in, haunted my fancy with that peculiar insistency, as of the half-lapsed recollection of a name or date, which tells us that we know (if we could only remember!) what happened in a place. I let the matter rest. But, looking into my mind one day, I found that a certain song of the early seventeenth century —(not Monteverde's Lamento d'Arianna but an air , Amarilli, by Caccini, printed alongside in Parisotti's collection )— had entered that Palace of Mantua, and was, in some manner not easy to define, the musical shape of what must have happened there. And that, translated back into human personages, was the story I have set forth in the following little Drama .