"Some of the reviewers, in regard to the 'Songs of the Ark,' seemed to think that a sufficiency of eastern scenery did not obtain in them. Doubtless this was correct; but I remark, that if my object in the undertaking had been to delineate scenery, I would not have turned my attention to the East, the scenes of which I never saw. Human nature being radically the same everywhere, a man, through the sympathies of that nature, can know to a certain extent what are likely to be the thoughts and feelings of his fellow-kind in any particular circumstances--therefore he has data upon which he can venture to give a representation of them; but it is very different from this in regard to topographical phenomena. It was therefore not the natural, but, if I may so call it, the moral scenery in which I was interested, more particularly since the whole scene of nature here below was, shortly after the period at which the poem commences, to become a blank of desolate uniformity, as overwhelmed beneath a waste of waters.
"At the risk of incurring the charge of vanity, I would venture to adduce one or two of the favourable opinions entertained in regard to some of the miscellaneous pieces which went to make up the volume of the 'Songs of the Ark.' Of the piece entitled 'Apathy,' Allan Cunningham thus wrote:--'Although sufficiently distressful, it is a very bold and original poem, such as few men, except Byron, would have conceived or could have written.' Motherwell said of the 'Sea-gray Man,' that it was 'the best of all modern ballads.' This ballad, shortly after I had composed it, I repeated to the Ettrick Shepherd walking on the banks of the Yarrow, and he was fully more pleased with it than with anything of mine I had made him acquainted with. He was wont to call me his 'assistant and successor;' and although this was done humorously, it yet seemed to furnish him with a privilege on which he proceeded to approve or disapprove very frankly, that in either case I might profit by his remarks. He was pleased especially with the half mysterious way in which I contrived to get quit of the poor old man at last. This, indeed, was a contrivance; but the idea of the rest of the ballad was taken from an old man, who had once been a sailor, and who was wont to come to my mother's, in the rounds which he took in pursuit of charity at regular periods of the year, so that we called him her pensioner.