PREFACE. ALFRED TENNYSON, my contemporary and friend, has enjoined some brother Poet "To learn to write his random rhymes Ere they be half-forgotten, Nor add and alter many times Till all be ripe and rotten "— and, acting on the latter part of this advice (as I have done, perhaps too frequently, on the former), I republish with very little alteration the poems, whose composition was so pleasant a labour to me in travelling through, or sojourning in, the bright countries of the South of Europe, and which, under other titles, have already been offered to the sympathy of other wayfarers. The "Memorials of a Tour in Greece were published ten years ago; and thus, though chargeable with the inaccuracies of an inexperienced writer, they were so far nearer the source of the classical associations of educated youth, and so far likely to be impregnate with a purer and stronger feeling of the worth and interest of that country and its history, than is perhaps compatible with the diversified studies and expanding objects of maturer years. The Italian poems express a very different tone of thought, and one which a short time ago could have hoped for little sympathy in this country. Now, indeed, I may expect more fellow-worshippers in St. Peter's than in the Parthenon; and if I have since been enabled, by additional research and freer speculation, to realise a more perfect Catholicity, I can only plead the influence that the ancient centre of so much faith and so much power exercised over my imagination, and the conviction that the impression thus made was, on the whole, salutary and truthful. 66 The Other Scenes have been recorded as they presented themselves to my mind-some of them long agosome almost yesterday; they take the low position of Occasional Poems, and can only acquire an interest from something beside and beyond themselves; in the present abundance of excellent and interesting poetry, they would hardly have been for the first time obtruded on the public; but some of them may, by this time, have found friends who would be glad to see them again. LONDON, July, 1844. |