Chapter I: Front Matter

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS
AND POEMS: A SELECTION

By
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

CONTENTS

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

Marcellus and Hannibal

Queen Elizabeth and Cecil

Epictetus and Seneca

Peter the Great and Alexis

Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn

Joseph Scaliger and Montaigne

Boccaccio and Petrarca

Bossuet and the Duchess de Fontanges

John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent

Leofric and Godiva

Essex and Spenser

Lord Bacon and Richard Hooker

Oliver Cromwell and Walter Noble

Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney

Southey and Porson

The Abbé Delille and Walter Landor

Diogenes and Plato

Alfieri and Salomon the Florentine Jew

Rousseau and Malesherbes

Lucullus and Caesar

Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa

Dante and Beatrice

Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth

Tasso and Cornelia

La Fontaine and de La Rochefoucault

Lucian and Timotheus

Bishop Shipley and Benjamin Franklin

Southey and Landor

The Emperor of China and Tsing-Ti

Louis XVIII and Talleyrand

Oliver Cromwell and Sir Oliver Cromwell

The Count Gleichem: the Countess: their Children, and Zaida

THE PENTAMERON

First Day's Interview

Third Day's Interview

Fourth Day's Interview

Fifth Day's Interview

POEMS

I. She I love (alas in vain!)

II. Pleasure! why thus desert the heart

III. Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives

IV. Ianthe! you are call'd to cross the sea!

V. The gates of fame and of the grave

VI. Twenty years hence my eyes may grow

VII. Here, ever since you went abroad

VIII. Tell me not things past all belief

IX. Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak

X. Fiesole Idyl

XI. Ah what avails the sceptred race

XII. With rosy hand a little girl prest down

VIII. Ternissa! you are fled!

XIV. Various the roads of life; in one

XV. Yes; I write verses now and then

XVI. On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia

XVII. Once, and once only, have I seen thy face

XVIII. To Wordsworth

XIX. To Charles Dickens

XX. To Barry Cornwall

XXI. To Robert Browning

XXII. Age

XXIII. Leaf after leaf drops off, flower after flower

XXIV. Well I remember how you smiled

XXV. I strove with none, for none was worth my strife

XXVI. Death stands above me, whispering low