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 Prescott and Bancroft could be better met by locating the origin at Shinar than at any other point, as it takes us back to a date where we may consistently locate the Shepherd Kings and the overrunning of Mizraim by them, a part of Egypt's early history which is outlined (more or less briefly) by nearly all early historians.
As to the initial period of Sun Worship and its origin, I could of necessity have but little aid, and if I have seemed a little too speculative, I have only this apology: The prodigy of Egypt's prehistoric development, and the manufacture of glass, antedating historic research. It needs no great imaginative tension to crown some incipient philosopher not only with the discovery of glass, but, that in its proper shape, it could be made to concentrate the solar rays, and produce fire; and at that day and age, what possible superstitions might result from these discoveries!
After the re-establishment of the Mizraim descent, and the consequent expulsion of the "Sons of Lud," the line of their journey is the natural outgrowth of their religious fanaticism. They know that India and the far East are inhabited, and they seek the uninhabited track for their exit.
The Mound Builders seem to be historic cousins of the Aztecs, certainly the superiors of the aborigines of the North and Middle Atlantic.
The expulsion of the Mound Builders will admit of many theories, and I have simply adopted the one that occurred to me as consistent with the Christian inspiration of all great events.
The settlement of Mexico by the Aztecs, (as a branch of the Mound Builders) follows naturally in the wake of previous events, and the chain is thus made complete, with no serious hazard to its consistency as merely speculative drama, leading up to what is plainly historical.