Becquer may be said to belong to the Romantic School, chief of whose
exponents in Spain were Zorilla and Espronceda. The choice of
mediaeval times as the scene of his stories, their style and
treatment, as well as the personal note and the freedom of his verse,
all stamp him as a Romanticist.

His legends, with one or two exceptions, are genuinely Spanish in
subject, though infused with a tender melancholy that recalls the
northern ballads rather than the writings of his native land. His love
for old ruins and monuments, his archaeological instinct, is evident
in every line. So, too, is his artistic nature, which finds a greater
field for its expression in his prose than in his verse. Add to this a
certain bent toward the mysterious and supernatural, and we have the
principal elements that enter into the composition of these legends,
whose quaint, weird beauty not only manifests the charm that naturally
attaches to popular or folk tales, but is due especially to the way in
which they are told by one who was at once an artist and a poet.

Zorilla has been said to be Becquer's most immediate precursor, in
that he possesses the same instinct for the mysterious. But, as Blanco
Garcia observes, "Becquer is less ardent than Zorilla, and preferred
the strange traditions in which some unknown supernatural power hovers
to those others, more probable, in which only human passions with
their caprices and outbursts are involved."[1] Correa says of his
legends that they "can compete with the tales of Hoffmann and of
Grimm, and with the ballads of Rückert and of Uhland," and that
"however fantastic they may be, however imaginary they may appear,
they always contain such a foundation of truth, a thought so real,
that in the midst of their extraordinary form and contexture a fact
appears spontaneously to have taken place or to be able to take place