The Tour of which the following Poems are very inadequate remembrances was shortened by report, too well founded, of the prevalence of Cholera at Naples. To make some amends for what was reluctantly left unseen in the South of Italy, we visited the Tuscan Sanctuaries among the Apennines, and the principal Italian Lakes among the Alps. Neither of those lakes, nor of Venice, is there any notice in these Poems, chiefly because I have touched upon them elsewhere. See, in particular, _Descriptive Sketches_, “Memorials of a Tour on the Continent in 1820,” and a Sonnet upon the extinction of the Venetian Republic.--W.W. I MUSINGS NEAR AQUAPENDENTE APRIL, 1837 [Not the less Had his sunk eye kindled at those dear words That spake of bards and minstrels. His, Sir Walter Scott’s, eye, _did_ in fact kindle at them, for the lines, “Places forsaken now” and the two that follow, were adopted from a poem of mine which nearly forty years ago was _in part_ read to him, and he never forgot them. Old Helvellyn’s brow Where once together, in his day of strength, We stood rejoicing. Sir Humphry Davy was with us at the time. We had ascended from Patterdale, and I could not but admire the vigour with which Scott scrambled along that horn of the mountain called “Striding Edge.” Our progress was necessarily slow, and was beguiled by Scott’s telling many stories and amusing anecdotes, as was his custom. Sir H. Davy would have probably been better pleased if other topics had occasionally been interspersed, and some discussion entered upon: at all events he did not remain with us long at the top of the mountain, but left us to find our way down its steep side together into the Vale of Grasmere, where, at my cottage, Mrs. Scott was to meet us at dinner. With faint smile … He said, “When I am there, although ’tis fair, ’Twill be another Yarrow.” See among these notes the one on _Yarrow Revisited_. A few short steps (painful they were) apart From Tasso’s Convent-haven, and retired grave.