XI.  LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

    “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
      Alone and palely loitering? 
    The sedge has withered from the lake,
        And no birds sing.

    “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
      So haggard and so woe-begone? 
    The squirrel’s granary is full,
        And the harvest’s done.”

    —­Keats.

XII.  SLEEP AND DEATH

    Death will come when thou art dead,
        Soon, too soon—­
    Sleep will come when thou art fled;
      Of neither would I ask the boon
    I ask of thee, beloved Night—­
    Swift be thine approaching flight,
        Come soon, soon!

    —­Shelley.

XIII. & XIV.  A DOCTOR OF PHYSIC

    Well, well, well,—­
    ...  God, God forgive us all!

    —­Macbeth, Act V., Sc. i.

XV.  ANNABEL LEE

    I was a child, and she was a child
      In this kingdom by the sea;
    And we loved with a love that was more than love—­
      I and my Annabel Lee—­
    With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
      Coveted her and me.

    —­Edgar Allan Poe.

XVI.  CRISEYDE

    ...  Love hadde his dwellinge
    With-inne the subtile stremes of hir yen.

    Book I., 304-5.

    Y-wis, my dere herte, I am nought wrooth,
    Have here my trouthe and many another ooth;
    Now speek to me, for it am I, Criseyde!

    Book III., 1110-2.

    And fare now wel, myn owene swete herte!

    Book V., 1421.

    —­Chaucer (Troilus and Criseyde).

The traveller
to
the Reader

The traveller who presents himself in this little book feels how tedious a person he may prove to be.  Most travellers, that he ever heard of, were the happy possessors of audacity and rigour, a zeal for facts, a zeal for Science, a vivid faith in powder and gold.  Who, then, will bear for a moment with an ignorant, pacific adventurer, without even a gun?

He may, however, seem even more than bold in one thing, and that is in describing regions where the wise and the imaginative and the immortal have been before him.  For that he never can be contrite enough.  And yet, in spite of the renown of these regions, he can present neither map nor chart of them, latitude nor longitude:  can affirm only that their frontier stretches just this side of Dream; that they border Impossibility; lie parallel with Peace.

But since it is his, and only his, journey and experiences, his wonder and delight in these lands that he tells of—­a mere microcosm, as it were—­he entreats forgiveness of all who love them and their people as much as he loves them—­scarce “on this side idolatry.”