_Paracelsus_ (1835).

"I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset,--mistaking
my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in
common,--judge it by principles on which it has never been moulded, and
subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. I
therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more
novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers,
whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions,
by the operation of persons or events; and that, instead of having
recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the
crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely
the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency
by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in
its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether
excluded; and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not
a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think
that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation,
the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such, only so long as
the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view. I
do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all
those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in
the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some
special fitness in themselves,--and all new facilities placed at an
author's disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously
rejected. It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more
immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its
success;--indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating
fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights
into one constellation--a Lyre or a Crown. I trust for his indulgence
towards a poem which had not been imagined six months ago, and that even
should he think slightingly of the present (an experiment I am in no
case likely to repeat) he will not be prejudiced against other
productions which may follow in a more popular, and perhaps less
difficult form.

15th March 1835."

2. Preface to _Strafford_ (1837).

"I had for some time been engaged in a poem of a very different nature
[_Sordello_] when induced to make the present attempt; and am not
wit