Don't you know that the laurel is the emblem of poetry, and that poets used, on public occasions, to be crowned with it ?' James stared when the question was first put, but was doubtless much pleased with the information.
443.

*_Ibid._ The discerning reader who is aware that in the poem of 'Ellen Irwin' I was desirous of throwing the reader at once out of the old ballad, so as if possible to preclude a comparison between that mode of dealing with the subject and the mode I meant to adopt, may here, perhaps, perceive that this poem originated in the four last lines of the first stanza.
These specks of snow reflected in the lake, and so transferred, as it were, to the subaqueous sky, reminded me of the swans which the fancy of the ancient classic poets yoked to the car of Venus.

Hence the tenor of the whole first stanza and the name of Lycoris, which with some readers, who think mythology and classical allusion too far-fetched, and therefore more or less unnatural or affected, will tend to unrealise the sentiment that pervades these verses.

But surely one who has written so much in verse as I have done may be allowed to retrace his steps into the regions of fancy which delighted him in his boyhood, when he first became acquainted with the Greek and Roman Poets.

Before I read Virgil I was so strongly attached to Ovid, whose _Metamorphoses_ I read at school, that I was quite in a passion whenever I found him, in books of criticism, placed below Virgil.