© The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association 2014 DOI 10.1179/0952414214Z.00000000041 the keats-shelley review, Vol. 28 No. 1, April 2014, 37–48 Prospects of Europe: The First Iteration of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Richard Lansdown James Cook University, Cairns, Australia An analysis of the first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in terms of the poet’s aristocratic, classical education, and the ways of seeing people, landscape, and history it encouraged. Forms of vision are central to the first instalment of this great European poem, and are shot through with ambivalence. keywords Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Europe, grand tour, classical education, vision It is but opening the eye, and the scene enters. (Addison, Spectator, issue 411) To introduce and contextualize the following discussion, I must repeat what has been written elsewhere: Childe Harold is one poem, in four cantos, based on three pilgrimages: from Newstead to Athens, from Waterloo to Lake Geneva, and from Venice to Rome. A pilgrimage is a special form of travel: the destination is known beforehand and dominates the expedition, and as readers we expect a distinct moral contrast between the point of departure and the point of arrival. The pilgrim travels from darkness to light, from blindness to insight, confusion to order, and from worldly values towards spiritual ones. But the three journeys that constitute Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are bound together in two historical sequences: one going forward with Byron’s life and career (in 1809– 10, 1816, and 1818), the other going ever further backwards into European history: The first is a journey through contemporary Napoleonic Europe, the Peninsular War, and the British-dominated Mediterranean to Greece as a ‘sad relic’ of its former greatness. The second starts at Waterloo and follows the Rhine upstream to its source in the Swiss Alps. In doing so it pursues the history of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s empire to its source, in the persons of three representative Enlightenment intellectuals, all of whom had lived on the shores of Lake Geneva: Rousseau, Voltaire, and Edward Gibbon. The third journey looks back further yet, from Renaissance Italy to its origins in classical Rome. The tours get shorter but the temporal perspectives get longer. All three are