SOURCE: Preface to The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton, Vol. I, John Murray, 1876, pp. v-xiv.

In the following preface to his collected poems, Milnes comments on the geographical, intellectual, and personal sources of his poetry.

The Grecian poems have their date in that period of life which, in a cultivated Englishman, is almost universally touched and coloured by the studies and memories of the classic world; and the scenes and personages they commemorate are, as it were, the most natural subjects of his poetic thought and illustration. They were accompanied, as first given to the public, with a considerable amount of prose narration and some antiquarian research; but the country has since then been so thoroughly explored by travellers and archæologists, that I am glad to avoid what would be a profitless repetition. There were, too, at that time, earnest expectations of a regenerated...