where are the sacred ashes of our first father Xolotl; those of the bounteous Nopal; those of the generous Tlotzin; or even the still warm cinders of my glorious and immortal, though unhappy and luckless father Ixtlilxochitl; if I continued thus questioning about all our august ancestors, what would you reply?  The same that I reply—­I know not, I know not; for first and last are confounded in the common clay.  What was their fate shall be ours, and of all who follow us.

7.  Unconquered princes, warlike chieftains, let us seek, let us sigh for the heaven, for there all is eternal, and nothing is corruptible.  The darkness of the sepulchre is but the strengthening couch for the glorious sun, and the obscurity of the night but serves to reveal the brilliancy of the stars.  No one has power to alter these heavenly lights, for they serve to display the greatness of their Creator, and as our eyes see them now, so saw them our earliest ancestors, and so shall see them our latest posterity.

* * * * *

It will be seen that the philosophy of these songs is mostly of the Epicurean and carpe diem order.  The certainty of death and the mutability of fortune, observations which press themselves upon the mind of man everywhere, are their principal staples, and cast over them a hue of melancholy, relieved by exhortations to enjoy to the utmost what the present moment offers of pleasure and sensual gratification.  Here and there a gleam of a higher philosophy lights the sombre reflections of the bard; his thoughts turn toward the infinite Creator of this universe, and he dimly apprehends that by making Him the subject of his contemplation, there is boundless consolation even in this mortal life.

Both these leading motifs recur over and over again in the songs printed in the original in the present volume, and this similarity is a common token of the authenticity of the book.

Sec. 10. THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT COLLECTION.

The most recent Mexican writers formally deny that any ancient Mexican poetry is now extant.  Thus the eminent antiquary, Don Alfredo Chavero, in his elaborate work, Mexico a traves de los Siglos, says, “the truth is, we know no specimens of the ancient poetry, and those, whether manuscript or printed, which claim to be such, date from after the Conquest."[55] In a similar strain the grammarian Diario Julio Caballero, writes:  “There has never come into our hands a single poetic composition in this language.  It is said that the great King Nezahualcoyotl was a poet and composed various songs; however that may be, the fact is that we have never seen any such compositions, nor met any person who has seen them."[56]

It is important, therefore, to state the exact provenance of the specimens printed in this volume, many of which I consider to have been composed previous to the Conquest, and written down shortly after the Nahuatl language had been reduced to the Spanish alphabet.