That being so, it can be guessed what it meant to me to saunter through those shady paths or sit in that grotto, and read what he had written on that spot. The scene I looked on he had looked on, the very fragrance that was in the air he too had inhaled, and there were his words composed and written on the spot! No wonder he is a very real person to me, and that the music of his words raises pictures for me others may not perhaps see.
When he sailed for the East his last words of reproach to Portugal were—
"Ungrateful country! thou shalt not even possess my bones." But even in that he was defeated. I believe it was an Englishman, Mr. Fitz-Hugh, who at Macao did so much to make these gardens a monument to the poet.
But his real monument is his undying poem, and where his enemies have passed into oblivion Camoens lives—or, as he says himself in the charming lines of the epic—
"The King or hero to the muse unjust
Sinks as the nameless slave, extinct in dust."
When I departed from Macao at eight o'clock one morning, it was to enter into a dense fog, in which the steamboat lay at rest for nearly two hours, the Captain keeping a sharp look-out on the junks, whose sails now and then loomed near us through the grey blanket. It was a strange experience lying motionless there in that grey world, with hundreds of incessantly talking Chinese padlocked down on the deck below us. Suppose, in the fog, a swarm of yellow-faced figures had suddenly boarded and overpowered us, and liberated those hundreds below us?—it might easily have been. And though I like the Chinese, I have always said that I should have a horror
