Tenby, was among his friends. Rose Aylmer, whose name he has made
through death imperishable, by linking it with a few lines of
perfect music, {1} lent Landor "The Progress of Romance," a book
published in 1785, by Clara Reeve, in which he found the description
of an Arabian tale that suggested to him his poem of "Gebir."

Landor began "Gebir" in Latin, then turned it into English, and then
vigorously condensed what he had written. The poem was first
published at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when
Landor's age was twenty-three. Robert Southey was among the few who
bought it, and he first made known its power. In the best sense of
the phrase, "Gebir" was written in classical English, not with a
search for pompous words of classical origin to give false dignity
to style, but with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of
apt words well compacted. Many passages appear to have been half
thought out in Greek or Latin, some, as that on the sea-shell (on
page 19), were first written in Latin, and Landor re-issued "Gebir"
with a translation into Latin three or four years after its first
appearance.

"Gebir" was written nine years after the outbreak of the French
Revolution, and at a time when the victories of Napoleon were in
many minds associated with the hopes of man. In the first edition
of the poem there were, in the nuptial voyage of Tamar, prophetic
visions of the triumph of his race, in march of the French Republic
from the Garonne to the Rhine -


"How grand a prospect opens! Alps o'er Alps
Tower, to survey the triumphs that proceed.