The climate of the island is healthy but rainy: that dungeon of Neptune, which is only seven or eight leagues in circumference, attracts the ocean vapours. The equatorial sun drives away every breathing thing at noon-day, forces the very gnats into silence and rest, obliges men and beasts to hide themselves. The billows are illumined at night by what is called "the phosphorescent light," a light produced by myriads of insects whose loves, electrified by the storms, kindle upon the surface of the deep the illuminations of an universal wedding. The shadow of the island, dark and motionless, reposes amid a moving plain of diamonds. The spectacle of the heavens is similarly magnificent, according to my learned and famous friend, M. de Humboldt[390]:

"We feel," he says, "an indescribable sensation when, on approaching the Equator, and particularly when passing from one hemisphere to the other, we see these stars, which we have contemplated from our infancy, progressively sink and finally disappear.... One feels that he is not in Europe, when he sees the immense constellation of the Ship or the phosphorescent Clouds of Magellan arise on the horizon....

"We saw distinctly," he continues, "for the first time the Southern Cross only on the night of the 4th of July, in the sixteenth degree of latitude....

"I recalled the sublime passage of Dante, which the most celebrated commentators have applied to that constellation:

"Io mi volsi a man destra, etc.[391]"

"Among the Portuguese and Spaniards, a religious feeling attaches them to a constellation whose form reminds them of that sign of the faith planted by their ancestors in the deserts of the New World."

*

The poets of France and of Lusitania have placed elegiac scenes on the shores of Melinda and the neighbouring isles. It is a far cry from those fictitious sorrows to the real torments of Napoleon under the stars foretold by the singer of Beatrice and in those seas of Eleonora and Virginia. Did the great men of Rome, banished to the isles of Greece, concern themselves with the charms of those shores and the divinities of Crete and Naxos? That which enraptured Vasco de Gama and Camoëns could not move Bonaparte: prone on the poop of the vessel, he did not perceive that above his head glittered unknown constellations whose rays met his eyes for the first time. What cared he for those stars which he had never seen from his bivouacs, which had not shone upon his empire? And yet no star was wanting to his destiny: one half of the firmament lighted up his cradle; the other was reserved for the pomp of his tomb.

The sea which Napoleon was crossing was not the friendly sea which carried him from the harbours of Corsica, from the sands of Abukir, from the rocks of Elba, to the shores of Provence; it was that hostile ocean which, after enclosing him in Germany, France, Portugal and Spain, opened out before his course only to close up again behind him. Probably, when he saw the waves urge on his ship, the trade-winds drive it ever further with a constant blast, he did not make the reflections upon his catastrophe with which it inspires me: each man feels his life in his own manner; he who affords a great spectacle to the world is less touched and less instructed than the spectator. Occupied with the past as though it could be reborn, hoping still in his memories, Bonaparte scarce perceived that he was crossing the line, nor asked what hand traced the circles in which the globes are compelled to imprison their eternal progress.

On the 15th of August, the wandering colony kept St. Napoleon's Day[392] on board the vessel which was taking Napoleon to his last halting-place. On the 15th of October, the Northumberland was abreast of St. Helena. The passenger mounted on deck: he had a difficulty in discovering an imperceptible black speck in the bluish immensity; he took a spy-glass: he surveyed that particle of earth as he might formerly have surveyed a fortress in the middle of a lake. He saw the market-town of St. James enchased in scarped rocks; not a wrinkle in that barren face but a gun hung from it: they seemed to wish to receive the captive according to his genius.