e encounter of
good-will as to withstand the shock firmly, that I thus attempt to
commemorate your good qualities, or rather the advantages which I have
derived from their exertion. Even the recurrence of the date of this
letter, the anniversary of the most unfortunate day of my past
existence,[365] but which cannot poison my future while I retain the
resource of your friendship, and of my own faculties, will henceforth
have a more agreeable recollection for both, inasmuch as it will remind
us of this my attempt to thank you for an indefatigable regard, such as
few men have experienced, and no one could experience without thinking
better of his species and of himself.

It has been our fortune to traverse together, at various periods, the
countries of chivalry, history, and fable--Spain, Greece, Asia Minor,
and Italy; and what Athens and Constantinople were to us a few years
ago, Venice and Rome have been more recently. The poem also, or the
pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it
may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency
on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it
was produced, and the objects it would fain describe; and however
unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however
short it may fall of our distant conceptions and immediate impressions,
yet as a mark of respect for what is venerable, and of feeling for what
is glorious, it has been to me a source of pleasure in the production,
and I part with it with a kind of regret, which I hardly suspected that
events could have left me for imaginary objects.

With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less
of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly,
if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The
fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one
seemed determined not to perceive: like the Chinese in Goldsmith's
_Citizen of the World_,[366] whom nobody would believe to be a Chinese,
it was in vain that I asserted, and imagined that I had drawn, a
distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to
preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing,
so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to
abandon it altogether--and have done so. The opinions which have been,
or may be, formed on that subject are _now_ a matt