“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 the disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether—­and have done so.”

This confession, though it may not have been wanted, gives a pathetic emphasis to those passages in which the poet speaks of his own feelings.  That his mind was jarred, and out of joint, there is too much reason to believe; but he had in some measure overcome the misery that clung to him during the dismal time of his sojourn in Switzerland, and the following passage, though breathing the sweet and melancholy spirit of dejection, possesses a more generous vein of nationality than is often met with in his works, even when the same proud sentiment might have been more fitly expressed: 

   I’ve taught me other tongues—­and in strange eyes
   Have made me not a stranger; to the mind
   Which is itself, no changes bring surprise,
   Nor is it harsh to make or hard to find
   A country with—­aye, or without mankind. 
   Yet was I born where men are proud to be,
   Not without cause; and should I leave behind
   Th’ inviolate island of the sage and free,
And seek me out a home by a remoter sea?

   Perhaps I lov’d it well, and should I lay
   My ashes in a soil which is not mine,
   My spirit shall resume it—­if we may,
   Unbodied, choose a sanctuary.  I twine
   My hopes of being remember’d in my line,
   With my land’s language; if too fond and far
   These aspirations in their hope incline—­
   If my fame should be as my fortunes are,
Of hasty growth and blight, and dull oblivion bar

   My name from out the temple where the dead
   Are honour’d by the nations—­let it be,
   And light the laurels on a loftier head,
   And be the Spartan’s epitaph on me: 
   “Sparta had many a worthier son than he”;
   Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need;
   The thorns which I have reap’d are of the tree
   I planted—­they have torn me—­and I bleed: 
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.