"I will try not to do so."
From The Month.
Scenes From a Missionary Journey in South America.
I. Lisbon, St. Vincent, Pernambuco, Bahia.
Toward evening of the 12th of March we doubled Cape Finisterre, the north-western extremity of Spain, and saw in the misty offing a very large four masted iron screw steamer, homeward bound, and said to be from Australia. We had but once seen the Spanish coast looming through the fog several leagues off; but at sunrise on the 14th we forgot all the miseries of the previous four days, as the sea was quite smooth, the weather admirable, and a scene of unequalled beauty unrolled itself before our eager gaze. We were entering the Tagus: on our left, at the river's mouth, stood the castle of St. Julian, apparently not a very ancient or remarkable structure. We had passed in the night, also on the left, the far-famed wood-crowned hills and picturesque glens of Cintra, so beautifully sung by Lord Byron in Childe Harold. Further on jutted into the stream the yellow-walled old Moorish fortalice of Belem, so often depicted, and so worthy of it. Its many lights and shadows, as the sunlight plays on its richly sculptured front, give it a strangely quaint and old-world appearance. Its garrison, a mere company or so, appeared to enjoy a sinecure; for I beheld a single sentinel lazily pacing up and down a narrow landing-place. Others were fishing with a rod and line, and a few more washing in the stream their seemingly unique shirts, for they wore no other clothing that I could see, save a pair of white canvas trowsers. This scene I saw repeated a few weeks later in the Brazilian island of Sancta Catharina, where a squad of black soldiers were washing their shirts and trowsers in the waters of a small mountain stream. From the castle of Belem the view eastward up the river is one of the most beautiful that can be imagined, and seems at first fully to justify the pride of the Portuguese lines:
"Quem nâo tem visto Lisboa,
Nâo tem visto cousa boa."
That is, he has not seen a beautiful sight who has not seen Lisbon. The river, considerably narrowed at its extreme mouth, widens here very much, and displays on its broad surface a forest of masts. On the left hand the city rises from the water's edge up an amphitheatre of seven hills, house upon house, church upon church, filling up an irregular semicircle of considerable extent, and having for a frame the surrounding green heights, whose tender spring verdure, here and there enlivened by the blooming Judas-tree, [Footnote 299] agreeably contrasts with the dazzling whiteness of most of the edifices. To the westward of the city sits the imposing mass of the modern and yet unfinished royal palace of Ajuda; and beneath it, near the waterside, an old convent and church, whose gray weather-beaten walls seem to bid defiance to the mushroom structure above. This palace of Ajuda will probably never be finished. The finances of that puny kingdom are not, I imagine, in the most prosperous condition; and it would appear that modern royalty is as little at ease in residences fashioned upon the grandeur and magnificence of ancient days, as a beggar would be if he suddenly became the owner and tenant of a nobleman's seat.
[Footnote 299: A tree with pendulous bunches of pink flowers. It is probably so called from its blooming about Passion-tide. Some say that it was on a tree of this species that Judas hanged himself.]