--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.
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