CAMOENS. 5 7 



That truth to nature which springs from actual con- 

 templation, shines most richly in the great national epic of 

 Portuguese literature ; it is as if a perfumed air from Indian 

 flowers breathed throughout the whole poem, written under 

 the sky of the tropics, in the rocky grotto near Macao and 

 in the Moluccas. It is not for me to confirm a bold 

 sentence of Priedrich SchlegeFs, according to which the 

 Lusiad of Camoens excels Ariosto in colouring and richness 

 of fancy ; ( 8S ) but as an observer of Nature, I may well add 

 that in the descriptive portion of the Lusiad, the poet's 

 inspiration, the ornaments of language, and the sweet tones 

 of melancholy, never impair the accuracy of the representa- 

 tion of physical phenomena. Rather, as is always the case 

 when art draws from pure sources, they heighten the living 

 impressions of grandeur and of truth in the pictures of 

 nature. Inimitable are the descriptions in Camoens of the 

 never ceasing mutual relations between the air and sea, 

 between the varying form of the clouds above, their meteoro- 

 logical changes, and the different states of the surface of the 

 ocean. He shews us this sur'ace at one time, as, when 

 curled by gentle breezes the short waves glance sparklingly 

 in the play of the reflected sunbeams ; and at another, when 

 the ships of Coelho' and Paul de Gama, overtaken by a 

 dreadful tempest, sustain the conflict of the deeply agitated 

 elements ( S9 ) . Camoens is in the most proper sense of the 

 term, a great sea painter. He had fought at the. foot of Atlas 

 in the empire of Morocco, in the Red Sea, and in the Persian 

 Gulf; twice he had sailed round the Cape, and for sixteen years 

 ^watched the phaenomena of the ocean on the Chinese and 

 Indian shores. He describes the electric fires of St. Elmo, 

 (the Castor and Pollux of the ancient Greek navigators) 



