Rambles in the Valley of Collares.--Elysian scenery. Song of a
young female peasant.--Rustic hospitality.--Interview with the
Prince of Brazil[20] in the plains of Cascais.--Conversation with
His Royal Highness.--Return to Ramalhaô.
Oct. 19th, 1787.
My health improves every day. The clear exhilarating weather we now
enjoy calls forth the liveliest sense of existence. I ride, walk, and
climb, as long as I please, without fatiguing myself. The valley of
Collares affords me a source of perpetual amusement. I have discovered a
variety of paths which lead through chesnut copses and orchards to
irregular green spots, where self-sown bays and citron-bushes hang wild
over the rocky margin of a little river, and drop their fruit and
blossoms into the stream. You may ride for miles along the bank of this
delightful water, catching endless perspectives of flowery thickets,
between the stems of poplar and walnut. The scenery is truly elysian,
and exactly such as poets assign for the resort of happy spirits.
The mossy fragments of rock, grotesque pollards, and rustic bridges you
meet with at every step, recall Savoy and Switzerland to the
imagination; but the exotic cast of the vegetation, the vivid green of
the citron, the golden fruitage of the orange, the blossoming myrtle,
and the rich fragrance of a turf, embroidered with the
brightest-coloured and most aromatic flowers, allow me without a violent
stretch of fancy to believe myself in the garden of the Hesperides, and
to expect the dragon under every tree. I by no means like the thoughts
of abandoning these smiling regions, and have been twenty times on the
point this very day of revoking the orders I have given for my journey.
Whatever objections I may have had to Portugal seem to vanish, since I
have determined to leave it; for such is the perversity of human nature,
that objects appear the most estimable precisely at the moment when we
are going to lose them.
There was this morning a mild radiance in the sunbeams, and a balsamic
serenity in the air, which infused that voluptuous listlessness, that
desire of remaining imparadised in one delightful spot, which, in
classical fictions, was supposed to render those who had tasted the
lotos forgetful of country, of friends, and of every tie. My feelings
were not dissimilar, I loathed the idea of moving away.
Though I had entered these beautiful orchards soon after sunrise, the
clocks of some distant conventual churches had chimed hour after hour
before I could prevail upon myself to quit the spreading odoriferous
bay-trees under which I had been lying. If shades so cool and fragrant
invited to repose, I must observe that never were paths better
calculated to tempt the laziest of beings to a walk, than those which
opened on all sides, and are formed of a smooth dry sand, bound firmly
together, composing a surface as hard as gravel.
These level paths wind about amongst a labyrinth of light and elegant
fruit-trees; almond, plum, and cherry, something like the groves of
Tonga-taboo, as represented in Cook’s voyages; and to increase the
resemblance, neat cane fences and low open sheds, thatched with reeds,
appear at intervals, breaking the horizontal lines of the perspective.
I had now lingered and loitered away pretty nearly the whole morning,
and though, as far as scenery could authorize and climate inspire, I
might fancy myself an inhabitant of elysium, I could not pretend to be
sufficiently ethereal to exist without nourishment. In plain English, I
was extremely hungry. The pears, quinces, and oranges which dangled
above my head, although fair to the eye, were neither so juicy nor
gratifying to the palate, as might have been expected from their
promising appearance.