1842.
The Tour of which the following Poems are very inadequate remembrances was shortened by report, too well founded, of the prevalence of Cholera at Naples. To make some amends for what was reluctantly left unseen in the South of Italy, we visited the Tuscan Sanctuaries among the Apennines, and the principal Italian Lakes among the Alps. Neither of those lakes, nor of Venice, is there any notice in these Poems, chiefly because I have touched upon them elsewhere. See, in particular, Descriptive Sketches, “Memorials of a Tour on the Continent in 1820,” and a Sonnet upon the extinction of the Venetian Republic.—W.W.
I
MUSINGS NEAR AQUAPENDENTE
April, 1837
[Not the less
Had his sunk eye kindled at those dear words
That spake of bards and minstrels.
His, Sir Walter Scott’s, eye, did in fact kindle at them, for the lines, “Places forsaken now” and the two that follow, were adopted from a poem of mine which nearly forty years ago was in part read to him, and he never forgot them.