humane reception: this he has immortalized in the prophetic song in the tenth Lusiad;[1] and in the seventh he tells us that here he lost the wealth which satisfied his wishes:
Agora da esperança ja adquirida, &c.
Now blest with all the wealth fond hope could crave,
Soon I beheld that wealth beneath the wave
For ever lost;———
My life, like Judah's heaven-doom'd king of yore,
By miracle prolong'd———
On the banks of the Mecon, he wrote his beautiful paraphrase of the psalm, where the Jews, in the finest strain of poetry, are represented as hanging their harps on the willows by the rivers of Babylon, and weeping their exile from their native country. Here Camoens continued some time, till an opportunity offered to carry him to Goa.—When he arrived at that city, Don Constantine de Braganza, whose characteristic was politeness, admitted him
- ↑ Having named the Mecon:
Este recebera placido, e brando,
No seu regaço o Canto, que molhado, &c.Literally thus: "On his gentle hospitable bosom (sic brando poeticè) shall he receive the song, wet from woful unhappy shipwreck, escaped from destroying tempests, from ravenous dangers, the effect of the unjust sentence upon him, whose lyre shall be more renowned than enriched." When Camoëns was commissary, he visited the islands of Ternate, Timor, &c., described in the Lusiad.
