t unfortunate day of my past existence,[25]
but which can not 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," 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 matter of indifference: the work is to depend
on itself and not on the writer; and the aut