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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027723059 
 
ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS 
 OF YALE UNIVERSITY. ON THE 14th MAY, 1908 
 
 THE PLACE OF QAMOENS 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
 By 
 
 JOAQUIM NABUCO 
 
 Ambassador of Brazil 
 
A. -2^3 f-u^6"'2^ 
 
 
The Place of Camoens in Literature 
 
 Gektlembn op Yale Univbesity : 
 
 "WTien I had read the Ltjsiads for the first time, I at 
 once wrote a book to tell of my wonder, offering for it 
 the only apology that a tribute of love is always ac- 
 ceptable to a poet. I do not repent of having recorded 
 in prin^ that early impression, which has developed into 
 years of faithful admiration and has kept company 
 with my mind throughout life. Still I always intended 
 to renew to Camoens on my decline the vow of my 
 youth, and it is quite an unexpected fortune for me to 
 be allowed to do it before a great American University. 
 
 While literary culture was chiefly under Latin influ- 
 ence the LtrsiADS was sure of the place claimed for it by 
 the Portuguese race. Now Culture is becoming more 
 diffusely Anglo-German and still every sign is that, 
 both in Anglo-Saxon and in German countries, its great 
 fame will continue unchallenged. These, however, are 
 hard times for the Classics, even for the favourite ones, 
 and some reminder seems necessary for Camoens 
 among the American students, to whom he has always 
 been more or less a stranger, although introduced by 
 Longfellow himself. 
 
 It is easy to show what a great poet Camoens is. It 
 is enough to take the Lusiads and read the episode of 
 Ignez de Castro, or the episode of Adamastor, or the 
 episode of the Isle of Love, but for that it is necessary 
 that the audience understand Portuguese. Failing this 
 condition, one must depend on the translator, on foreign 
 help. To deprive a Poet of his language is to take away 
 from him half his soul. Who could translate into 
 
French or Italian Milton's L' Allegro or Shelley's To 
 a Skylark, without a loss of what was dearest in either 
 to them? Every great poet is great in any language, 
 but none is ever as great in another as in his own, and 
 the loss they suffer by translation may be so material 
 as to affect their relative position in literature. That is 
 the case with Camoens. 
 
 Speaking specially of him, he has before any audi- 
 ence not familiar with Portuguese many other disad- 
 vantages in a competition. He is above all his Nation's 
 poet; that was not only his fate, it was also his am- 
 bition, and, as the poet of Portugal, he suffers from the 
 want of general interest in the Portuguese race, in the 
 part it played in history, in its individuality. The 
 world is always charmed by the names of Greece, 
 Eome, the Italian Eepublics of the Middle Ages, and 
 that gives an additional lustre to the Iliad, the ^neid, 
 the Divine Comedy. In everything fortune has its part, 
 with nations as well as with men, and in nothing else as 
 much as in fame. When the claim of a poet comes to be 
 weighed, the charm of his own race should therefore be 
 considered. Only an ancient Eoman could say with 
 real knowledge to what extent each of the three lan- 
 guages, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, sounds like 
 his Latin ; certainly much of the mother tongue has been 
 preserved in each of them that was effaced by use or 
 disuse from the other two ; still Portuguese is the ne- 
 glected sister. That must be a case of historical pres- 
 tige. Then the subject of the Lusiads, the discovery 
 of the East, appeals more to the European than to the 
 American imagination. For the Americans Vasco da 
 Gama is a secondary figure to that of Columbus. The 
 true interest of Discovery centres for us in the crossing 
 of the Atlantic and in the finding of America. 
 
If we sum up the circumstances that will tell against 
 Camoens abroad, we have: the general ignorance of 
 the language in which he wrote; the too great loss he 
 has suffered by translation; the lesser hold that Por- 
 tugal has on the imagination of the world ; the inferior 
 interest of the Portuguese language on this account; 
 and, lastly, the shade that Columbus casts, specially in 
 the American mind, over Vasco da Grama, as heroes of 
 the Age of Discovery. Do not think I am making my 
 favourite appear so handicapped to withdraw him from 
 the field. I stick to his colours. I only want to explain 
 ito you the indifference felt for the Lxjsiads beyond the 
 limits of the Portuguese language. 
 
 Since I mentioned the translators, I must assure you 
 I do not intend to disparage them. Camoens would 
 feel proud of their homage. They have all rendered 
 much service to him. Eichard Fanshaw's translation, 
 printed in 1655, popularized the Ltjsiads among the 
 men of letters of the Eestoration. It is the one that 
 Milton must have read. That of Mickle was repub- 
 lished several times since 1776, and both Southey and 
 Walter Scott called him a poet and a man of genius. 
 What they did for the 17th and 18th centuries, 
 Quillinan, unfortunately only in part, Aubertin and 
 Eichard F. Burton did for the 19th. Still we should not 
 read any of them with the impression that we are read- 
 ing Camoens himself. None is safe. All put much of 
 their own in the poem. Another translator is needed 
 who will not lend to the poet, but will let him appear 
 entirely alone, without fearing for him. Whenever 
 the rendering of a former translator should be found to 
 be a perfect equivalent of the original in English verse, 
 that ought to be saved. Once perfection is attained, 
 one should simply copy it. Perfection is final. Such a 
 
translation of the Lusiads would reveal a mucli greater 
 Camoens to the English speaking races. The master's 
 own picture lies hidden for them under the work of his 
 translators. "Why should not this prose version come 
 from Yale? You have the man: Professor Henry E. 
 Lang. Portuguese, however, has such resemblance 
 with Spanish and, although less, with Italian, that a 
 reader of Cervantes or of Dante in the original would 
 easily notice any sensible difference between the Portu- 
 guese text and the translation by comparing them. 
 
 I will give a stanza of the Lxjsiads in Portuguese and 
 in Italian to show the resemblance between the two lan- 
 guages and that of both with Latin. Camoens explains 
 the love of Venus for the Portuguese, whom Bacchus 
 wishes to destroy. I will read it first in English: 
 "Against Bacchus stands the beautiful Venus, at- 
 tached to the Lusitan race for the many qualities she 
 found in it of her own beloved Eomans: the stout 
 hearts; the brilliant star, showed on the lands of 
 Tanger; and the language, which, the more she thinks, 
 the more appears to her, with slight change, to be the 
 Latin." I, 33. 
 
 Sustentava contra elle Venus bella 
 
 Sosteneva contro dilui Venere J)eUa 
 
 AffeiQoada a gente Lusitana 
 
 Affeeionata alia gente Lusitana 
 
 Por quantas quaUdades via nella 
 
 Per (tutte) quante (le) qualitd, vedeva in essa 
 
 Da antiga tao amada sua Romana: 
 
 Delia antica tanto amata sua [gente) Romana: 
 
 Nos fortes coraeoes, na grande estrella, 
 
 Nei forti cuori, nella grande Stella, 
 
 Que mostraram na terra Tlngitana; 
 
 Que (essa) avea mostrata sulla terra Tingitana; 
 
 E na lingua, na qual quanto imaglna, 
 
 E nella lingua cM piU vi pensa (quanto imagina) 
 
 Com pouca corrupgao cr§ que 6 a Latina. 
 
 Con poca (corruzione) differenza crede che sia la Latina. 
 
Let me say a short word for Portugal. Portugal is 
 one of the Nations that play a leading part in History, 
 that is, one of those which accomplish through their 
 initiative some destiny of mankind. In a sense, all 
 modern discoverers may be said to hail from the school 
 of Sagres and to have had Prince Henry-the-Navigator 
 for their patron. Not to speak of the earlier discov- 
 eries, like those of Madeira, the Azores, the Cabo Verde 
 Islands, it was a Portuguese, Bartholomeu Dias, who 
 converted the Cape of Tempests into the Cape of Good 
 Hope; another, Vasco da Gama, who first reached 
 India; another, Pedro Alvares Cabral, who discovered 
 Brazil, and to another, Magellan, belong the great 
 honours of the circumnavigation of the Globe. Without 
 the Portuguese discoveries you could not explain 
 Columbus. The influence of the Portuguese navigators 
 was certainly the greatest of all upon him; he must 
 have learned sea-life under their teaching; he married 
 the daughter of one of Prince Henry's captains; he 
 lived for a time in Lisbon, and it was only by some yet 
 unknow mystery that the honour of helping him to 
 carry out his dream passed from King John II of 
 Portugal to Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1580 however, 
 such was then the force of the dynastic principle, 
 Philip the Second of Spain succeeded to the thone of 
 Portugal and the Nation disappeared. 
 
 It was a providential accident that the Lusiads was 
 published on the very eve of the country's death. The 
 result, sixty years later, was the resurrection of the 
 nationality, all over the seas, almost intact, and in 
 parts, as in Brazil, even aggrandised. Between 1572, 
 the year of the Poem's birth, and 1640, when the Eesto- 
 ration took place, there had been issued in Lisbon no 
 less than thirteen editions. The name alone was a na- 
 
tional rallying cry. The master-piece raised between 
 the two races of the Peninsula an intellectual frontier, 
 such as Don Quijote would have raised in favour of 
 \ Spain, had Portugal been the dominating Power. No 
 || doubt the spirit of Nationality was also kept alive by 
 |!the legend of Dom Sebastiam, whose return the Portu- 
 guese nation expected during centuries ; but Sebastian- 
 ism was, to a great extent, a creation of the Lusiads, its 
 first creation. 
 
 Vasco da Gama's voyage is only the episode of the 
 Poem; the divinity to whom it is consecrated, its col- 
 lective hero, is "the noble Lusian breast, whom both 
 Neptune and Mars obeyed. ' ' 
 
 ". . . . o peito illustre Lusitano, 
 A quern Neptuno e Marte obedeceram." 
 
 He sings all those who by valorous deeds free them- 
 selves from the Law of Death : 
 
 "Aquelles que por obras valerosas 
 Se vao da lei da morte libertando." 
 
 i Like every true national Poem, the Ltjsiads is cyclical. 
 
 \j Its fragments are the nation's legends, each appearing 
 
 I the chief one while it is sung. The national feeling was 
 
 j so strong with the Poet that, both on beginning and on 
 
 closing his Poem, he is thinking of another great event 
 
 to sing. The title would admit as many more cantos as 
 
 might be the Portuguese heroic undertakings. Even 
 
 some other might continue the Poem, if his equal could 
 
 be found. 
 
 This is the first great impression of the Lusiads: 
 Country-worship. The work is planned as the national 
 
Monument. The men and women of Portuguese his- 
 tory are the statues, or medallions; the country's bat- 
 tles, the large frescoes; the voyage to India, the en- 
 circling frieze; the discovered seas and lands, the 
 mosaic pavement. One must understand that the 
 Poem is both a national chapel and a national reli- 
 quaire, not to question the space given in it to Portu- 
 guese history alone. Camoens was a Portuguese be- 
 fore being a poet, as Dante was an Italian and Milton 
 an Englishman. Much of his work is therefore bound 
 to be indifferent to strangers. He meant it. Portions 
 of it can only be appreciated with the Portuguese soul. 
 In every great literary construction there is also, of 
 necessity, a large part, which only forms the structure, 
 the mass, the size of the work. You need not notice 
 that ; it is like the dark foliage, through which the flow- 
 ers are scattered ; the barren soil, that forms the cup of 
 the emerald lake. Much more however of Portuguese 
 history than he leaves, so to say, in state of ore, is con- 
 verted by the Poet into perfect poetry by a single touch 
 of legend or by a touch of Ideal. It is poetry in the 
 LusiADS, all throughout, the voyage of the ships of 
 Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India ; it is poetry, its 
 rendering of the origins of the Portuguese nation ; her 
 battles with Spain and with the Moors ; the meeting of 
 Queen Maria of Spain and her Father Dom Alfonso IV ; 
 the story of Dona Ignez de Castro ; poetry, the ever so 
 many epitaphs he writes for the brave who fell fighting 
 for King and Country in distant parts; the itinerary 
 of the envoys of Dom Joam II in search of the land- 
 route to India ; the figures he sculptured full size ; it is 
 poetry, each of his short drawings of Portuguese scen- 
 ery, or of any far away domain of "the small Lusi- 
 tanian home," "da pequena casa Lusitana." "In 
 
8 
 
 Africa slie holds maritime settlements ; in Asia she is 
 more sovereign than all; in the new fourth Part she 
 cultivates the fields, and, if there was still more World, 
 there she would reach. ' ' VII, 14. 
 
 The second great impression of the Lusiads is that 
 it is the Poem of the Sea. Camoens spent years of his 
 life on the sea in times when sailing created an intimacy 
 with it, both in calm and in tempest, quite unknown 
 now that the reign of the wiads has come to an end. 
 That long, silent and deep communion shows itself in 
 nearly every stanza of his. The Lusiads is a Poem to 
 be read on deck, under the sails. Its action passes 
 on board-ship. Camoens drew from the ocean all the 
 inspiration it contains and passed it to his readers. 
 Alexander von Hmnbolt writes of him: "Camoens 
 abounds in inimitable descriptions of the never ceasing 
 interchange between the air and the sea, between the 
 varying forms of the clouds, the transformation of the 
 sky, and the different states through which passes the 
 surface of the ocean. He is, in the strictest sense, a 
 great sea-painter." You should read the whole pas- 
 sage in Humbolt's Cosmos. What strikes most in 
 Camoens are not, however, so much the descriptions, 
 remarkable for their accuracy and insight of Nature, 
 in which the naturalist delights, as the touches, the 
 solitary verses, that contain all the poetry of the sea. 
 One feels as if on the sea itself, so much so that to read 
 him is really like sailing, as far as imagination is con- 
 cerned. Still nothing could be more simple than his 
 style. See if you detect any artifice in these verses, 
 remembering, however, that the old myths live in his 
 heart and are his natural exclamations. 
 
"The ships are now sailing over the wide ocean, parting the 
 restless waves; the winds breath softly, and fill the hollow sails; 
 the seas appear covered with white froth, as the prows cut through 
 the consecrated maritime waters, where runs the flock of Pro- 
 teus." — I, 19. 
 
 And again : 
 
 "The winds push them so gently as one who has the heaven for 
 his friend; the air is serene, the skies appear without a cloud, or 
 fear of danger; they have already passed the cape of Prasso, of 
 ancient name, in the Ethioplc coast, and the sea uncovers before 
 them the new isles that it encircles and is ever washing around." — 
 I, 43. 
 
 In no Poem will yon find more perfect pictures, in a 
 few touches only, of the rising and setting of the sun, 
 of the moonlight, of every aspect of the sea, of de- 
 parture and return, of all that makes the sailor's life, 
 till his burying in a wave. 
 
 "Quam facil 6 ao corpo a sepultura! 
 Quaesquer ondas do mar . . ." 
 
 —V, 83. 
 
 He will call the ships "swimming birds," nadantes 
 aves. IV, 49. 
 
 What Portuguese ever saw the Tagus coast disap-\ 
 pear in the horizon who did not keep the last impres- 
 sion fixed by Camoens 1 ' ' Our sight is already little by' 
 little exiled from the home hills which remained; re- 
 mained the dear Tagus and the cold heights of Cititra, 
 and on them our eyes were stretching; there also re- 
 mained the hearts which grief leaves behind, and when 
 the beloved country was all hidden away, we saw noth- 
 ing but sea and sky." 
 
10 
 
 "J&. a vista pouco e pouco se desterra 
 D'aquelles patrios montes que ficavam: 
 Ficava o caro Tejo e a fresca serra 
 De Cintra, e nella os olhos se alongavam; 
 Ficava-nos tambem na amada terra 
 O coragao, que as magoas, IS, deixavam; 
 B ja, despois que toda se escondeo, 
 Nao vimos mais em fim que mar, e ceo." 
 
 — V. 
 
 Of Equatorial Africa lie says : "We passed the limit 
 where stops the sun when leading his chariot to the 
 North and where lie the races to which the son of 
 Clymene (Phaeton) refuses the colour of the day." 
 
 Here are a few short pictures of morning and sun- 
 set. "As soon as the dappled dawn (to take the word of 
 Milton) spreads over the quiet skies her lovely hair and 
 opens the purple gate to bright Hyperion, rising from 
 his sleep." 
 
 Now the music of the Poet himself : 
 
 "Mas assl como a Aurora marchetada 
 Os fermosos cabellos espalhou 
 No ceo sereno, abrindo a roxa entrada 
 Ao claro Hyperionio, que acordou . . ." 
 
 I, 59. 
 
 Again: "Already the loving star scintillates in the 
 horizon before the bright sun, and visits, messenger of 
 the day, the earth and the wide sea with a gladdening 
 brow." 
 
 "Mas ja a amorosa estrella scintlUava 
 Diante do sol claro no horizonte, 
 Messageira do dia, e visltava 
 A terra, e o largo mar, com leda fronte." 
 
 —VI, 85. 
 
II 
 Hear how it sounds like Italian : 
 
 "Ma gia I'amorosa Stella sclntillava 
 Dlnanzi al chiaro sol nell 'orlzzonte, 
 Messagera del di, e visitava 
 La terra e 11 largo mar con lieta fronte." 
 
 The verses give the same fresh, luminous, awakening 
 impression as the words of Shakespeare on the lips of 
 Romeo : 
 
 ". . . jocund day 
 ' ' Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain, tops. ' ' 
 Once more, the morning: "The sl(w shadows. were 
 already dissolving ov er the flowers of earth in fresh 
 dew^' ' Hear the inimitable beauty of it in Portuguese : 
 
 "lam-se as sombras lentas desfazendo 
 Sobre as flores da terra em frio orvalho." 
 
 —II, 92. 
 
 Now the sunset. The sun is approaching his "longed- 
 for, tardy, goal, and the God of Night opens for him the 
 gate of his secret ocean home. ' ' 
 
 "B da casa maritima secreta 
 Lhe estava o deus nocturno a porta abrindo." 
 
 —II, 1. 
 
 And elsewhere again the evening twilight: "Now the 
 light began to grow uncertain, as the mighty lamp was 
 hiding beneath the horizon, and, full of light, was carry- 
 ing the day to the antipodes. ' ' 
 
 "Mas ja a luz se mostrava duvidosa, 
 Porque a alampada grande se escondia 
 Debalxo do horizonte, e luminosa 
 Levava aos antipodas o dia." 
 
 VIII, 44. 
 
12 
 
 The third great impression is that of Empire build- 
 ing and of sea-power. Camoens has done for Portugal 
 what was never done by her poets for England, but, by 
 doing it for his own Nation, he has celebrated the whole 
 colonial expansion of Europe. The Lusiads is the poem 
 of colonization, of far away enterprise, and therefore 
 the poem of the building up of the New World. It ex- 
 presses the whole law of immigration, the greatest of 
 all events of modern History, in a single verse: "Any 
 land is country for the strong. ' ' 
 
 "Que toda terra e patria para o forte." 
 
 Edgar Quinet in his Genie des Religions says that the 
 Ltjsiads is the poem of the alliance of the West with 
 the East. . . . "You find in it everywhere, he writes, a 
 soul as deep as the ocean and like the ocean it joins the 
 two opposite shores." No doubt there is in the Lusiads 
 a powerful evocation of the newly discovered East, but 
 the western spirit remains free in the Poet from all its 
 influence, does not suffer its penetration, nor surren- 
 ders, like Alexander, to its charm. The East appears to 
 him only as a field of enterprise and action. The two 
 shores that the Lusiads seem destined to link are not so 
 much those of Europe and Asia, as those of Europe and 
 America, because, as has so often been said, the Lusiads 
 is the poem of commerce and industry, the poem of 
 the Modern Age, and in all this the part of America is 
 and shall be much larger than that of Asia. 
 
 The fourth great impression is creative power, 
 imagination. Nothing shows it better than the manner 
 in which Camoens converts a dull log-book into grand 
 poetry. The transformation begins with the dream of 
 King Dom Manoel, to whom appear the spirits of the 
 
13 
 
 Granges and the Indus, to tell that Portugal will rulej 
 in India. Follows the departure of the fleet from Lis- ■ 
 bon, a picture in which Camoens personifies the Past 
 ia the figure of an old man, with a wisdom all made of 
 experiences, condemning the whole course of faraway 
 conquest, by which ' ' the old Kingdom would be dispeo- 
 pled, weakened and transplanted afar." IV, 101. 
 
 "For quern se despovoe o reino antigo, 
 Se eafraquega e se va deitando a longe 
 
 —IV, 101. 
 
 After the condemnation of the national policy pursued 
 by the Portuguese kings, Camoens renews in a curse 
 against all human daring the bland reproaches of 
 Horace in his Ode to the ship carrying Virgil to 
 Athens 
 
 " , qui f ragilem truci 
 
 Commisit pelago ratem 
 Primus, " 
 
 ' ' Cursed be the one the first who in the world put a sail 
 to a dry log upon the waves. ' ' 
 
 "Oh maldito o primeiro, que no mundo 
 Nas ondas vela poz em secco lenho!" 
 
 —IV, 112. 
 
 Then comes Adamastor, than which there is not a 
 greater creation in modern Literature, a living Myth. 
 Hear how the Giant tells his own story, when he sees 
 that his prophecies will not make the Portuguese turn 
 their ships round. There is not a word that does not 
 belong to the Poet in what is going to be read to you. 
 The Greek orators stopped to have the decrees of 
 
14 
 
 Athens read by the herald. I will ask one of you to be 
 the herald of Camoens. 
 
 "I am that hidden and great Cape which you named of Tem- 
 pests, never known to Ptolemy, Pomponius, Straho, Pliny, nor to 
 any of those who passed. . . . Here I end all the African 
 coast on this my never seen promontory, which extends towards 
 the Antartic Pole, whom your presumption now so much offends. 
 
 "I was one of the fiercest sons of Earth, like Bnceladus, ^geus 
 and the Centiman; my name was Adamastor and I took part in the 
 war against him that hurls Vulcan's bolts: not that I piled hill 
 upon hill, but, conquering the waves of the ocean, I was Captain 
 of the sea, where wandered the fleet of Neptune which I was 
 pursuing. 
 
 "Love for the noble spouse of Peleus led me to undertake such 
 great enterprise. I scorned all the goddesses of Heaven only to 
 love the princess of the waters. One day I saw her with the daugh- 
 ters of Nereus come out all bare on the shore and at once my will 
 was so enslaved that even now I do not feel anything that I long so 
 much for. 
 
 "As it would be impossible to obtain her through the ugly hugeness 
 of my face, I determined to take her by arms and I told Doris of 
 my intent. The Goddess in dread speaks to her for me, but 
 she with an honest and candid laughter replied: 'What love of a 
 Nymph would be enough to bear that of a giant? 
 
 "Still to free the ocean from so much war, I will seek a way to 
 excuse my honour and to avoid the harm.' The messenger brought 
 me that answer, and, as lover's blindness is great, I would not see 
 the snare and my bosom was filled with abundances of raptures and 
 hopes. 
 
 "Pooled, renouncing already war, one night promised by Doris, 
 I saw at a distance the beautiful form of the white Thetis, alone 
 unrobed. Like mad, I run from afar, opening my arms to her who 
 was the life of this body, and I begin to kiss her lovely eyes, her 
 cheeks and her hair. 
 
 "Oh, from humiliation, I hardly can say more, Thinking I had 
 in my arms the loved one, I found myself embracing a rugged moun- 
 
IS 
 
 tain of the harshest wood. Standing, face to face, before a stone 
 which I clasped for the angelic figure, I remained not a man, hut 
 deaf and motionless, and close to a rock, another rock. 
 
 "Oh, Nymph the most fair of the ocean, since my presence does 
 not please thee, what would it cost to keep me in this deceit, 
 were it mountain, cloud, dream or nought? Raging and well nigh 
 insane from the grief and the shame suffered there, I left in 
 search of another world where none would scofC at my tears and 
 my despair. 
 
 "Meanwhile my brethren were vanquished and in extremest 
 misery placed, some, for the greater surety of the Gods, lying be- 
 neath various superposed mountains, and, as against Heaven hands 
 are of no avail, I began, while weeping my misfortune, to receive 
 from an enemy Fate the penalty for my audacity. 
 
 "My flesh is converted into solid earth, my bones into rocks, and 
 these limbs, which thou seest, and this form were extended along 
 these long waters; at last, my enormous stature was changed by 
 the Gods into this remote Cape and, to double my woes, Thetis is 
 surrounding me with her waves." 
 
 —V, 50-59. 
 
 This is the mighty Spirit of the Cape, which will live 
 as long as Table Mountain shall appear before men's 
 eyes. "Already Phlegon and Pyrois were drawing, 
 with the other pair, the radiant chariot, when began 
 to show itself the high headland into which the great 
 giant was converted." V, 61. 
 
 The last of the large frescoes worthy of the Eenais- 
 sance is the Isle of Love, which Venus puts and moves 
 in the ocean before "the second Argonauts, who 
 have just discovered the New World," to give them 
 all the delights of Nature and of Love. The Isle 
 of Love is a poem by itself. Is it an allegory, 
 as the Poet says ? ... Or did he only say it to pass 
 the Cerberus of the Inquisition? The sensualism of the 
 composition is as naif as that of Eden before nakedness 
 
i6 
 
 was felt. The beauty of the scenery equals that of any 
 other landscape in poetry. The whole tapestry might 
 serve as model for many paintings. The Chase of 
 Diana of the Domenichino seems copied from it. 
 
 : This brings me to one more great impression of the 
 ^LusiADS : The Renaissance. The Lxjsiads is the only one 
 Poem that reflects and resumes it, the only one written 
 under its inspiration. There is in Lisbon a most inter- 
 esting manuscript of 1549, from a Portuguese painter, 
 Francisco de HoUanda, telling his conversations with 
 Michelangelo in Eome. I only know a fragment trans- 
 lated into French. Camoens never left Portugal, ex- 
 cept to fight in Africa and to fight in India. He had, 
 however, the intuition of the Eenaissance as perfect as 
 if he had been, like Francisco de HoUanda, in the com- 
 pany of Michelangelo, Baccio Bandinelli, Perino del 
 Vaga, Sebastiano del Piombo, and, last but not least, 
 Vittoria Colonna, marchesa di Pescara. That shows 
 that a new spirit is an all-encircling wave. Perino, for 
 instance, will have painted the ships of ^neas and the 
 struggle of the Giants with Jupiter, in the Villa Doria 
 in Genoa, under the same dictation as Camoens painted 
 Vasco da Gama's ships and the fate of Adamastor. 
 Camoens' work has exactly the character of the later 
 work of Raphael. Between his Venus, his Galatea, his 
 Cupid and those of Raphael, I at least could not distin- 
 guish. I never went to the Farnesina that I had not the 
 impression that Camoens and Raphael were twin paint- 
 ers. I keep in my Lusiads as its best illustration the 
 pictures of the Farnesina. 
 
 The Mythology of the Lusiads seems an evolution of 
 the old Mythology such as would perhaps have taken 
 place if Paganism had lasted ten centuries more by 
 
17 
 
 the side of Christianity. It is living. As a Poetics, it 
 has kept all its plastic force. It is not a pastiche; it is 
 a perfect survival. Camoens is much more of a 
 Polytheist in invention, I do not say in criticism, as he 
 never explained his creations, than Goethe. It was 
 once said that the Greeks and the Germans alone have 
 drunk at the cup of the Muses. There is nothing in 
 German literature to compare with the myths of the 
 LusiADs. The Muses are nowhere so visible as here. 
 The reign of Neptune, for example, had never such 
 splendour; never were held in the Ocean so brilliant 
 courts ; never did the sea swarm with so many beautiful 
 Nymphs. The Ltjsiads is truly the poem of Venus. It 
 is a censer, in which are burnt to her all the perfumes of 
 the newly discovered East. 
 
 A sixth great impression of the Poem is the direction 
 of life to the highest pursuits. In the Ltjsiads Camoens 
 has satisfied the four great passions of his soul ; in fact, 
 his whole soul : Country, Love, Poetry, and Action. He 
 could not have given them all such an immensity of 
 expansion and such an intensity of glow in any other 
 field. It is that which makes the superiority of the 
 Ltjsiads to any purely literary Epic as a guide of life. 
 The Poet lived his inspiration ; his work comprises both 
 poetry and action of the highest order. 
 
 The spirit of action appears in every stanza, with the 
 spirit of , loftiness, that raises it. On every human 
 sphere p marked the lines that divide the highest and 
 the lowest regions of action. He will say, for instance 
 of love: "Love of a lower kind enfeebles the strong;" 
 or "Love badly placed is the more exacting." While 
 he traces in admirable verses in Canto V and" in Canto 
 X the loyalty and devotion of the Portuguese people to 
 
i8 
 
 its monarcli, lie says bluntly that the Kingdom will not 
 obey nor suffer a king that will not excel all others. 
 
 "A rei nao obedece, nem consente, 
 Que nao for mais que todos excellente." 
 
 —11, 93. 
 
 Because "a weak king makes weak a strong race." 
 
 "Que um fraco rei faz fraca a forte gente." 
 
 —Ill, 138. 
 
 Of Dom John I he says that "to him strength grew 
 from his heart as to the Hebrew Samson from his 
 hair. ' ' 
 
 "Joanne a quern do peito o esforgo crece, 
 Como a Samsao h§breu da guedelha." 
 
 —IV, 12. 
 
 He sets the standard of courage on a higher basis than 
 the equality of strength, when he says that "it is not 
 like the Lusitans to fear a greater power because of 
 being the smaller. ' ' 
 
 "Per que nao 6 das forgas Lusltanas 
 Temer poder maior por mals pequeno." 
 
 —Ill, 99. 
 
 He promises never to sing any ambitious man, who 
 wishes to rise to high charges only to exercise his vices 
 in a wider sphere"; nor him "who to court the erring 
 vulgar shall surpass Proteus in change of figure"; 
 nor him "who does not find it just and good respect 
 to pay the sweat of the servile people," and "who 
 taxes with a mean and rapacious hand the toils he 
 does not share." (VII, 84-86.) He condemns thus 
 the malign and cowardly abuse of power: "He who in- 
 
19 
 
 flicts a vile and unjust harm by using the power and 
 the force in which he is invested, does not win; the 
 true victory is to have on one's side right naked and 
 entire." 
 
 "Quern faz injuria vil e sem razao, 
 Com forgas e poder, em que estS, posto, 
 Nao vence; que a victoria verdadeira, 
 E' saber ter justiga nua e inteira." 
 
 —X, 58. 
 
 He denounces Christianity for abandoning the tomb 
 of Christ and upholds the freedom of Greeks, Thra- 
 cians, Armenians and Georgians with eloquence 
 greater than that of Gladstone: "0 wretched Chris- 
 tians, are you perchance the teeth sown by Cadmus, 
 which give to each other a cruel death, having all come 
 from the same womb f 
 
 O'miseros Christaos! pela ventura 
 Sois OS dentes de Cadmo desparzldos. 
 Que uns aos outros se dao a morte dura, 
 Sendo todos de um ventre produzidos? 
 
 —VII, 9. 
 
 "If you go and conquer alien lands moved by greed 
 of large seignories, do you not see that the Pactolus 
 and the Hermus both roll auriferous sands ? In Lydia 
 and Assyria are worked threads of gold ; Africa hides 
 ia her bosom brilliant veins. May so much wealth move 
 you, since the holy house does not move. ' ' VII, 11. 
 
 He pays the highest tribute to the liberal poet-King 
 Dom Diniz, for the foundation of the University of 
 Coimbra : 
 
 "It was lie who first caused the high craft of Minerva to be 
 practised In Coimbra and made the Muses desert the Helicon to 
 tread the rich verdure of the Mondego; all that could be expected 
 
20 
 
 In Athens Is given here by proud Apollo; here he distributes the 
 wreaths of baccharis and evergreen laurel twined with gold." — 
 III, 97. 
 
 But the gospel of the true American spirit, of what 
 has been named "strenuous life", are the verses in 
 which he exalts the feat of the Portuguese discoverers 
 on their arrival in India. Here you will recognize your 
 own ideal, when read by one of you : 
 
 "It is through these dreadful dangers, these grievous labours and 
 fears, that those who are friends of fame win the immortal hon- 
 ours, the highest degrees; not by leaning on the ancient tree of 
 their noble ancestry, nor by lying on golden beds amidst soft sables 
 from Moscovia. 
 
 "Not with novel and exquisite viands, not with easy and Idle 
 walks; not with the varied and infinite delights that effeminate the 
 generous breasts; not with the never conquered appetites, which 
 Fortune keeps always as her charms not to allow anyone to turn 
 his steps into some earnest heroic deed. 
 
 "But by searching with his strong arm honours which he may 
 rightly call his own; by watching and dressing in arrays of steel; 
 enduring tempests and wild waves; vanquishing icy colds in the 
 heart of South and regions bare of shelter; swallowing the tainted 
 food spiced with arduous suffering. 
 
 "And by forcing the face that would grow pale to look assured, 
 gay and unbroken, to the red hot balls that, whistling, carry away 
 his comrade's leg or arm: thus the heart contracts a noble callous- 
 ness, spurner of honors and wealth forged by fortune and not 
 by valor hard and righteous. 
 
 "Thus brightens the understanding which long experiences have 
 set at rest and he can see, as from a high sphere, the base intricacy 
 of human dealing wherever in force the covenant of right, un- 
 mindful of private affections. This one shall rise, as is due, to 
 illustrious command against his own will, not by soliciting." 
 
 I wish to point out one great impression more. 
 
21 
 
 Higliest poetical genius may not necessarily require 
 adversity as its atmospliere ; but tlie relation of adver- 
 sity with it is certainly a striking one in the three cases 
 of Dante, Camoens and Milton. In prosperity Camoens 
 would not have gone to India and without the voyage 
 to India it is impossible to imagine the Lusiads. He 
 might have produced a poem as beautiful ; he could not 
 have produced one so stirring. He might perhaps have 
 been even more the poet of the Renaissance, if he had 
 seen Italy instead ; but he would not have been the na- 
 tional poet he is. That is the last impression I alluded 
 to : that you see throughout his work the figure of the 
 Poet under the fate intent on the creation of the 
 Lusiads. 
 
 He begins full of enthusiasm, certain of the laurel 
 that will crown him. He says to the boy-kiag Dom 
 Sebastiam, speaking of his verses : ' ' Thou shalt see love 
 of Country, not moved by a vile prize, as it is no vile 
 prize to be renowned by the acclaim of my paternal 
 nest." 
 
 Vereis amor da patria, nao movido 
 De premlo vil, mas alto, e quasi eterno: 
 Que nao e premio vil ser conhecido 
 Per um pregao do ninho meu paterno. 
 
 —I, 10. 
 
 And the honeymoon of intellectual creation, of the 
 wedding of genius with his work, lasts nearly through- 
 out the composition of the whole Poem. Here and there 
 you detect signs of dejection at the indifference and un- 
 gratefulness he experiences. At the end of the fifth 
 Canto he will say that only his own love for his country 
 is forcing the Muses to give renown in the lyre to his 
 hero, as Calliope is not herself a friend of his, nor would 
 
22 
 
 the Tagids leave their golden webs to sing him. He re- 
 members sometimes and resents, but he feels he is 
 fully avenged when he once has pilloried m his Epic the 
 vices and abuses of India. He fights bravely. Only 
 when his task is nearly over he shows weariness. At 
 the beginning of the last Canto, after saying he is losiag 
 the taste for writing, he breaks in this lonely vain, 
 that makes one remember Milton on his blindness. 
 
 "Years are declming and shortly I shall have stepped from sum- 
 mer into autumn; adversity chills my genius, and no longer I rejoice 
 or pride in it; sorrows are taking me to the river of dark oblivion 
 and eternal sleep; still, Queen of the Muses, grant me to fulfill 
 the vow I made to my country." — ^X, 9. 
 
 Vao OS annos decendo, e ja do estio 
 Ha pouco gue passar ate o outomno: 
 A fortuna me faz o engenho frio. 
 Do qual JS, nao me jacto, nem me abono. 
 Os desgostos me vao levando ao rio 
 Do negro esquecimento e eterno sono: 
 Mas, tu me da que cumpra, 6 gran rainha 
 Das Musas, c'o que quero a nagao minha! 
 
 Or, as Mickle puts it : 
 
 "Yet let me live to crown the song 
 That boasts my nation's proud renown." 
 
 The Poem, however, was now complete, he could see 
 in his manuscript the dazzling wealth he had accumu- 
 lated during those long years of patient suffering; he 
 had given wings to the prose of Castanheda and Joam 
 de Barros, so that the glory of Portugal would no longer 
 be buried to the world in the Portuguese language, 
 and when he embarks to Lisbon, after exile of six- 
 teen years in Asia, the hope of a national recognition 
 smiles again to him, while no longer firing his heart as 
 
23 
 
 in his youth. What a disappointment! The nation 
 was already on her death-bed. She could not feel the 
 message of immortality he was bringing — she had no 
 sympathy with those who tried to lead her into heroic 
 action or immortal fame, and he pronoxmces his "No 
 more! No more!" 
 
 "No more. Muse, no more. The lyre lies out of tune and my voice 
 has grown harsh, not from singing, but from finding that I have 
 sung to a deaf and insensible people. This nation can not give 
 the favors that most fire the genius, as she is immersed in the 
 taste of covetousness and in the rudeness of an austere, worn out 
 and vile sadness." — ^X, 45. 
 
 Still see what an incorrigible automaton the poet, 
 the creator, is of the inspiration, which never cares for 
 his own sorrow. The very last words of the Lusiads 
 shall be again an appeal to the young and mad king, 
 Dom Sebastiam, then of age, to go to Africa and rout 
 the Moors, so that the Poet's "already renowned and 
 content Muse" could sing again and the world might 
 see in him "an Alexander who need not envy the for- 
 tune of Achilles."— X, 156. 
 
 The Muse was content, but the instrument was 
 broken. This is one of the great impressions of the 
 Lusiads : the tragedy of persecuted genius at work. 
 
 Gentlemen, I only wished to make you more curious 
 of the Lusiads and I hope I have succeeded. I did not 
 come here to submit to criticism what an immemorial 
 prescription raises above it. There is a reason why 
 genius should only be recognized by the masses, and 
 that is, because it draws from them the inspiration that 
 it returns to our mind in poetry, as the cloud gives back 
 to the earth in fertilizing rain the water it drew from 
 the ocean. Here I am remembering the observation 
 
24 
 
 made by Camoens, that the water-spout returns the sea- 
 water without any of its salt. (V, 22), Genius also 
 keeps for itself all the bitterness of the inspiration it 
 imbibes in life's ocean. 
 
 We do not fear for Camoens. As soon as the 
 LusiADs appeared, Torquato Tasso made himself the 
 paranymph del calto e buon Luigi, who has ever since 
 ranked by the side of him "who drank so deeply of the 
 Aonian fount" 
 
 Esse que bebeu tanto da agua Aonia (V, 87). 
 
 and of the other, quoting again from him, "who illu- 
 mines the whole Ausonia and whose divine voice lulls 
 to sleep his native Mincio and swells the Tiber with 
 pride. ' ' 
 
 Ess' outro que esclarece toda Ausonia, 
 A cuja voz altlsona e divina, 
 Ouvlndo, o patrio Mincio se adonnece, 
 Mas o Tibre c'o som se ensobervece. 
 
 —V, 87. 
 
 He achieved, like them, through poetry, an aim be- 
 yond the reach of the statesman and of the king, that 
 of imparting immortal life to the spirit of his race. Do 
 not compare the Ltjsiads with La Divina Commedia or 
 with Paradise Lost, or with Orlando Furioso and 
 Gerusalemme Liberata ; compare it with the Iliad and 
 the ^neid. Dante gives you the spirit of the Middle 
 Ages ; Aristo and Tasso try to inspire themselves in an 
 epoch that was no longer theirs ; Milton takes his sub- 
 ject beyond the range of human imagination, where it, 
 at least, could not soar with our senses ; Camoens alone 
 among the poets remained on the same ground that 
 Homer and Virgil occupied, and he shows that that 
 
25 
 
 ground is eternal, as the one on which was raised the 
 Parthenon. 
 
 Camoens, no doubt, borrowed from Virgil, as when , 
 he makes Venus the protectress of the Portuguese 
 and of their ships, but whatever he borrows he:] 
 renovates, as a great painter treating the same subject 
 that inspired a former one. No human mind was ever 
 great enough to owe all to itself alone. Virgil took from 
 Homer more than Camoens from him. The law of 
 genius is that of Moliere : " Je prends mon Men ou je le 
 trouve;" only he must make it truly his own by a differ- 
 ent and superior title, as Shakespeare so often did. 
 
 Who could say which is more beautiful: the Greek 
 temple or the Gothic Cathedral? It is like asking which 
 is the finer sight : the sea in calm or the sea in tempest. 
 We may love above all the figure of Prometheus ; we are 
 bound to do so, as we are his intellectual children, but 
 if we consider mind, not heart, power, not beneficence, 
 we cannot place the Prometheus of ^schylus above the 
 Satan of Milton. No one knows which is the greater of 
 the two : Newton, who found the law of the Universe, or 
 Eaphael, who received the wand of beauty. Intellectual 
 measures must be taken in depth and width, as well as 
 in height, and you have to look for them in design, ia 
 colour, in music, and not only in words. 
 
 Gentlemen, I did not intend, on coming here, to in- 
 dulge in any invidious comparisons. They nowhere 
 appear so odious as in the enjoyment of Nature and of 
 Poetry. I hope you do not believe in them. The true 
 law of criticism is found in the Genesis : ' ' And God saw 
 that it was good." All is equally good that is really 
 created. You cannot graduate perfection. I did not 
 mean when I took for my subject the place of Camoens 
 in literature to put him in line with the other great 
 
26 
 
 poets and take their respective heights. I only wanted 
 to show that he is one of those peaks, which cannot be 
 measured, of the immortal chain of Creators. 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 On page 13, 19th line, read "Cursed be the first" instead 
 of "Cursed be the one the first," etc. 
 
 On page 20, the 7th paragraph should read : 
 "Thus brightens the understanding which long experiences have 
 set at rest and he can see, as from a high sphere, the base intricacy 
 of human dealing. Wherever be in force the covenant of right, un- 
 mindful of private affections, this one shall rise, as is due, to 
 Illustrious command against his own will, not by soliciting." 
 
 On page 22, 7th line, read "lonely vein" instead of "lonely- 
 vain," etc. 
 
 On page 22, 31st line, read "after an exile" instead of 
 "after exile," etc. 
 
 On page 24, 27th line, read "Ariosto" instead of "Aristo." 
 
Camoens— THE Lyric 
 Poet 
 
 Address at Vassar College 
 
 on April 21, 1909 
 
 by 
 
 JOAQUIM NABUCO 
 
 Brazilian Ambassador 
 
 H 
 
CAMOENS-THE LITRIC POET 
 
 Last year I spoke of Camoens at Yale University; 
 this year it is my good fortime again to speak of him 
 and to do it before the institution in which, as a true 
 poet, drawing inspiration more from woman than from 
 man, he would prefer, among all others of this country, 
 to anchor his fame. Love was the daily bread of his 
 genius ; as a poet, he fed on love : in his early verses, as 
 the singer of his own joys and pains ; in his maturity, 
 as the mirror of its power on nature and mankind. 
 I will attempt tonight to give you an idea of the part 
 that the worship of woman plays in his work. But, 
 before, I had better say a word on the part it played in 
 his own life, and for this I will draw a short raccourci 
 of that life. 
 
 Much has been written on it that seems to me an 
 attempt at vivisection. It is cruel to snatch the inner- 
 most secrets of a man from the privacy, nay, from the 
 oblivion, to which he wished his most clement Madonna 
 would relegate them, and to uncover his life before 
 masked posterity, simply because he created a master- 
 piece. 
 
 The principal events in the life of Camoens may be 
 resumed thus. He was bom in 1524, and received a 
 strong classical education at Coimbra under his uncle, 
 the chancellor of the University, Frei Bento de Camoens. 
 After 1542 he settled in Lisbon, courting the beauties 
 of the Palace and writing to them no end of verses, until 
 he fell in true love with one of them, a young Lady to 
 
the Queen. This love caused his relegation from the 
 capital and his enlistment for Africa, where he was 
 wounded and lost one of his eyes, an event which dis- 
 abled him for general courtship. Returning to Lisbon, 
 he wounded a man in a street fight, was incarcerated, 
 and could only free himself by engaging for military 
 service in India. In 1553 he leaves for the East, where 
 he will spend sixteen years, from his 29th to his 45th 
 year. This is the period of the Lusiads. In 1569 he 
 returned to Lisbon, after constant misfortune. In 
 1572 the LtrsiADS was published. In 1580 Portugal dies 
 as a nation, thanks to him for sixty years only, and he 
 dies with her. This is the frame of his life. The first 
 half of it belongs to the Lyric, the second to the Epic 
 poet, although the Lyric was never as great in his 
 youth as under the first shadows of decline. 
 
 Much remains doubtful in that life. Two men in the 
 present time, one of them now deceased, have done 
 much to reconstruct it, Dr. Theophilo Braga and the 
 German, Dr. Wilhelm Storck. Their names will be 
 forever associated with his as those of the Morgado de 
 Matteus in the first quarter and of Viscount de Juro- 
 menha after the middle of the last century. They have 
 done considerable work, but one wonders if the doubt- 
 ful points will ever be settled. At the end of the nine- 
 teenth century, Dr. Storck, for instance, started the idea 
 that the ever-acknowledged mother of Camoens, Dona 
 Anna de Sa, was only his stepmother, his true mother 
 having died while giving birth to him. Philip the Sec- 
 ond of Spain granted a pension to Dona Anna de Sa 
 in the belief that she was the mother of the poet, but 
 Dr. Storck believes more in his own interpretation of 
 a verse of Camoens than in the Royal decree of the 
 Spanish King. Both books, that of Theophilo Braga 
 
and that of Dr. Storck, swarm with new conceptions of 
 the events in the poet's life, nearly all based on their 
 reading of his poems, dated and located by them anew. 
 There is much ingeniousness in their restorations, but 
 I feel sure the poet would wonder at many of the epi- 
 sodes and intentions sworn by them. I must say I 
 speak with the highest respect for their knowledge and 
 their work and under a very great debt, but I cannot 
 help thinking that both feel too sure of their divining 
 gift. 
 
 I am afraid that with the advance of years there is a 
 tendency to concentrate admiration and to let one man 
 represent the literature of an epoch or of a people. 
 Something of the kind is happening to me with regard 
 to Camoens; but I have not yet reached the period of 
 fetichism, as Storck, Theophilo Braga, Eichard Bur- 
 ton, and others did. Every truly great work must con- 
 tain much rock by the side of the gold. I find dreary, 
 long passages in Dante, Milton, or Camoens. I am 
 certainly wrong, and they right, as the author reads 
 what he composes at the light of his inspiration; his 
 writing is only the shadow of what rushes on him, 
 either through his brain or through his heart, and 
 which he tried to reduce to words. Other people read 
 without any interior light to illuminate them as to the 
 source of the thought; they receive only the ashes of 
 the poet's inspiration, the echo of his inner song, and 
 they interpret him, each in his own way. 
 
 There is a doubtful point in the history of Camoens 
 of the most intense interest. The dispute between his 
 claimant birth-cities move only their own citizens ; the 
 dispute about the woman whose love inspired him 
 appeals to a much wider class, that of lovers, and not 
 only to lovers alone, to all who give them a smile. Tra- 
 
dition has fixed her name as Catherina de Athayde, and 
 her rank or employment as that of Lady to the Queen, 
 Dona Catherina. Unfortunately, there was, it seems, 
 more than one Dona Catherina de Athayde in the Royal 
 Palace of Lisbon, at least two: the daughter of 
 Dom Alvaro de Souza, and the daughter of Dom An- 
 tonio de Lima. The chief biographers, including 
 Braga and Storck, agree that the poet's enchantress 
 was the latter; the claim of the first, however, has 
 revived since the publication of a passage in the papers 
 of her confessor. The story with the daughter of Dom 
 Antonio de Lima would be this : Camoens saw her in 
 her adolescence, was relegated from Court for aspiring 
 to her, and remained faithful to that love through all 
 his persecutions and her neglect until her death. She 
 never married and died young in Court. The story 
 with the daughter of Dom Alvaro de Souza would be 
 this: Camoens loved her before her marriage, which 
 upset all his life and made him strong enemies in Court. 
 Persecution caused his exile and his enlistment for 
 Africa. When he returns to Lisbon it is to hear of her 
 marriage. Hence his fight with one of her husband's 
 relatives and his departure for India, having nothing 
 else to attach him to his country. There seems to exist 
 more reality in the second story : it accounts better for 
 the tone of his love sonnets, and it alone accounts for 
 those in which he complains of having been sacrificed 
 to an unworthy rival ; it accounts for the aggression he 
 made on a relative of hers in the King's service; it ac- 
 counts better for his distress, for the life he led, and for 
 his departure. 
 
 One cannot help seeing a strange coincidence in the 
 assault committed by Camoens on Gongalo Borges, 
 half-brother of Ruy Borges, the husband of Dom 
 
AJvaro de Souza's daughter. And what to say of her 
 words to her confessor, Frei Joao do Eosario, from the 
 Dominican Convent of Aveiro, a house to which she 
 was most attached and where she is believed to rest? 
 This is the note about her found in her confessor's 
 papers: "And every time I spoke to her of the poet,, 
 exiled because of her, I had always the answer that it 
 was not so and that it was his great soul that had com- 
 mitted him to great enterprises in remote countries." 
 As she died in 1551, the reference here is to the ab- 
 sence of Camoens in Africa. Perhaps she knew not 
 where he had gone. The questioning by her confessor 
 shows that the attachment of Camoens was well known 
 around her, while her answer, although that of a 
 faithful wife, who wished to stop all murmurs, shows 
 she could not hide her admiration for the poet, who had 
 loved her in her maidenhood and loved her still without 
 hope. 
 
 The problem is not easy to solve, as the most beau- 
 tiful love verses of Camoens were written in India and 
 speak of a long sentiment, still in its constancy, al- 
 though subdued by resignation and through the death 
 of all earthly hope, and there is no doubt, if dates on 
 tombstones are not altered, that the daughter of Dom 
 Alvaro died before his departure for the East. Is it 
 possible that he had not heard of her death? One 
 thing, however, appears most probable from the verses 
 of Camoens: that the young person. he so ardently 
 loved married another man, and that he remained faith- 
 ful to her. 
 
 The love of Dante for Beatrice did not die with her 
 marriage; the effect of the marriage on her poet was 
 only to render that love immortal by making her unat- 
 tainable to him. There is much resemblance between 
 
the love verses of Camoens and those of Dante and 
 Petrarca indicating a similar story. The intensity of 
 •despair which he puts in his verses speaks of an ob- 
 stacle more hopeless than the opposition of others to 
 the two lovers 's will. The love that he received and 
 which he pours forth in his Lusiads did not come from 
 the look of a young girl, soon after, and forever, an 
 absent and silent image in his mind. It speaks of the 
 full reciprocation of two hearts beating in unison. 
 
 Wordsworth, asking a critic not to scorn the sonnet, 
 reminded him of Shakespeare and of Camoens, 
 
 Camoens soothed with it an exile's grief, 
 
 and when Elizabeth Browning wanted a title for her 
 love sonnets, that would veil for a moment her author- 
 ship. Browning could not find a better one than this — 
 [Sonnets from the Portuguese. These two reminiscences 
 are sufficient to show the deep impression caused among 
 phe poets of England in past generations by Camoens 's 
 bonnets. Some of them appeared in the little book of 
 Lord Strangford, Poems from the Portuguese of Luis 
 ■de Camoens, printed in 1803, and many more in the 
 Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Luis de Camoens 
 of John Adamson, published in 1820. The admiration 
 of Eobert Southey, expressed by his own translations, 
 contributed much to place the love poems of Camoens 
 alongside those of Dante and Petrarca. In Camoens, 
 ■as in Dante, the epic eclypses entirely the lyric, still the 
 lyric is of first magnitude. The reason is that the epic, 
 or collective, light is more powerful of its nature 
 than the lyric, or personal, one. It is a very con- 
 siderable work, the lyric work of Camoens. Some pre- 
 tend that even without the Lusiads it would be enough 
 
to assure him his rank among the greatest poets. I be- 
 lieve that without the Lusiads his name, owing to the 
 narrower circle of Portuguese, would not compete with 
 Petrarca, and I am afraid that he would not even be 
 recognized in Portugal and Brazil as infinitely above 
 all other native poets. I do not speak for myself. I 
 place him in a solitary sphere in the literature of the 
 two sister languages, Portuguese and Spanish. But 
 when I come to Dante and Petrarca, I must say it 
 seems to me that they closed the cycle of the love son- 
 nets, and that all done after them is either implied or 
 in germ in their work. In fact, Dante 's sonnet 
 
 Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare 
 
 La donna mia, quand' ella altrui saluta 
 
 stands above all love sonnets as the bourn not to be 
 twice attained, and which recedes with each new gen- 
 eration of poets that passes. I thought I had better re- 
 mind you of it, hoping it will be a lifelong friend of 
 yours, as it has been of mine.* 
 
 *Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare 
 La donna mia, quand'ella altrui saluta, 
 Che ogni lingua divien, tremando, muta, 
 B gli occhi non ardiscon di guardare. 
 
 Ella sen va, sentendosi laudare, 
 Benignamente d'umilta, vestuta; 
 B par che sia una cosa venuta 
 Di clelo in terra a miracol mostrare. 
 
 Mostrasi si piacente a chi la mira, 
 
 Che da per gli occhi una dolcezza al core, 
 
 Che intender non la pud chi non la prova. 
 
 B par che della sua labhia si muova 
 Uno spirito soave e pien d'amore 
 Che va dicendo aH'anima: sospira! 
 
8 
 
 Still it is a splendid crop that of the seeds sown by the 
 Italian love poets of the early Renaissance, and no- 
 where they produced flowers so much like the primitive 
 ones as in the verses of Camoens. I cannot associate 
 Shakespeare to them, as Shakespeare is a world apart, 
 entirely a new projection on the whole domain of 
 Poetry, but Dante, Petrarca and Camoens come from 
 the same divine pattern ; the poetical soul of the first 
 resounded to the end in the second, and their combined 
 spirit passed on to the third and spent itself among 
 men. Camoens as a lyric is the echo of Dante and 
 Petrarca: the echo not of their songs, but of their 
 singing. The three make a chain unique in Poetry. 
 They were detached from the same chorus, which they 
 will have joined again. 
 
 Here is one of his sonnets, describing the first im- 
 pression he had of no longer being free. It was in 
 church, like Petrarca, and on a Holy Friday. I will 
 translate it into English prose. Translations in verse 
 do not associate only two different literatures, as it is 
 inevitable in any translation; they generally associate 
 also two very unequal poets: 
 
 "The religious rites were being celebrated in the temple where 
 every being glorified the divine Maker, who on that day had restored 
 Jhis work with his own sacred blood. Love, who watched the 
 ■occasion, when I felt my will should be safest, stormed my mind 
 and sight with the rarest angelic figure. Believing that the place 
 defended me from his wonted ways, and not knowing that none was 
 too confident to escape him, I let myself be made captive. But today, 
 realizing that he wished me for your slave, I repent of the time I 
 was free." 
 
 ! O culto divinal se celebrava 
 
 No templo donde toda creatura 
 Louva o Feitor divino, que a feitura 
 Com seu sagrado Sangue restaurava. 
 
Amor alii, que o tempo me aguardava, 
 Onde a vontade tlnha mals s^gura. 
 Com uma rara e angelica figura, 
 A vista da razao me salteava. 
 
 Eu, crendo que o lugar me defendla 
 De seu livre costume, nao sabendo 
 Que nenhum confiado Ihe fugla; 
 
 Deixei me captivar; mas hoje vendo, 
 Senhora, que per vosso me queria. 
 Do tempo que fui livre me arrependo. 
 
 This idea that love conceals itself in the eyes of one 
 who attracts us, to fall by surprise on its prey, comes 
 again and again in different forms : 
 
 "The fond and sweet bird is arranging its plumage with its 
 little bill and in the leavy branch it pours forth without restraint 
 its joyful and amorous verses, while the cruel fowler, avoiding in 
 silence and on tiptoe Its sight, directs his arrow with a sure eye 
 against its heart giving it on the Stygian lake an eternal nest. 
 In this way my heart, that was moving about in freedom, although 
 long destined to this fate, was wounded where it least expected, 
 as the blind archer waited to take me unaware, concealed in your 
 clear eyes." 
 
 TSatlt o lascivo e doce passarinho 
 Com o biquinho as pennas ordenando; 
 O verso sem medida, alegre, e brando, 
 Despedindo no rustico raminho. 
 
 O cruel cagador, que do caminho 
 Se vem callado, e manso desviando. 
 Com prompta vista a setta endireitando, 
 Lhe da no Estygio Lago eterno ninho. 
 
 Desta are o coragao, que livre andava, 
 (Posto que jS, de longe destinado) 
 Onde menos temia, foi ferido. 
 
lO 
 
 Porque o frecheiro cego me esperava 
 Para que me tomasse descuidado, 
 Em vossos claros olhos escondido. 
 
 This is the usual tone of his sonnets: praises and com- 
 plaints, caresses and fears : 
 
 "Spring is concentrating its colours in your image, on your cheeks, 
 on your lips, it spreads on your brow roses, lilies and carnations. 
 In colouring your features. Nature shows all its art. Hill and 
 valley, river and forest are jealous of such tints. But if you do not 
 allow him who loves you to cull the fruit of those flowers, your eyes 
 will lose all their charm. As it is no use, fair Dame, for Love to 
 sow loves in you, if your condition only produces thorns." 
 
 Bsta-se a Primavera trasladando 
 Em vossa vista deleitosa e honesta; 
 Nas bellas faces, e na boca, e testa, 
 Cecens, rosas e cravos debuxando. 
 
 De sorte, vosso gesto matizando, 
 Natura quanto p6de manifesta; 
 Que o monte, o campo, o rio, e a floresta 
 Se estao de vos, Senhora, namorando. 
 
 Se agora nao quereis que quem vos ama 
 Possa colher o fructo destas flores, 
 Perderao toda a graga os vossos olhos. 
 
 Porque pouco aproveita, linda Dama, 
 Que semeasse o amor em v6s amores, 
 Se vossa condigao produze abrolhos. 
 
 — xxvm. 
 
 Compare with this one : 
 
 Give back this whiteness to the lily and this crimson colour to the 
 pure roses. Give back to the sun the luminous flames of those 
 eyes that condemn thee to constant robbery. Give back the de- 
 lightful cadence of this voice to the sweet siren, and this grace 
 to the Graces, who complain of having theirs less serene on thy 
 account. Give back beauty to beautiful Venus, wisdom, genius. 
 
II 
 
 art to Minerva, and purity to chaste Diana. Divest tliyself of 
 this greatness, all made of gifts, and thou shalt remain with thy- 
 self alone: that is with inhumanity. 
 
 Tornai essa brancura 4 alva assucena, 
 E essa purpurea c6r as puras rosas: 
 Tornai ao Sol as chammas luminosas 
 De essa vista que a roubos vos condena. 
 
 Tornai d suavisslma sirena 
 De essa voz as cadencias deleitosas; 
 Tornai a graga Ss Graeas, que queixosas 
 Estao de a ter por v6s menos serena. 
 
 Tornai a bella Venus a belleza; 
 
 A Minerva o saber, o engenho, e a arte; 
 
 E a pureza & castissima Diana. 
 
 Despojai-vos de toda essa grandeza 
 De does; e ficareis em toda parte 
 ComovoBco s6, que he s6 ser inhumana. 
 
 — CSX. 
 
 He studies the nature of love in his own heart, the 
 maze of its contrasts : 
 
 Love is a fire that burns without being seen; a wound that aclie§, 
 without pur minding it;. It is a discontented contentment; a ptiln 
 that makes one rave without feeling the pain. It is to care for 
 nothing but always to care; to live solitary among people; not to 
 feel happy in bliss; to think one wins when one is losing. 
 
 It is to remain in prison for pleasure; to serve her who wins her 
 winner; to be loyal to one who kills us. But how can Its favour 
 produce so much conformity in human hearts, being love so con- 
 trary to itself? 
 
 Amor 6 um fogo que arde sem se ver; 
 E' ferida que doe, e nao se sente; 
 E' hum contentamento descontente; 
 E' dor que desatina sem doer. 
 
12 
 
 B' um nao querer mals que bem querer, 
 E' solitario andar por entre a gente; 
 B' um nao contentar-se de contente; 
 E' cuidar que se ganha em se perder. 
 
 B' um estar-se preso por vontade; 
 
 E' servir a quem vence o vencedor; 
 
 E' um ter com quem nos mata lealdade. 
 
 Mas como causar pode o seu favor 
 Nos mortaes corasQes conformidade, 
 Sendo a si tao contrario o mesmo amor? 
 
 Here is another that belongs to the metaphysics of 
 love, the essence of Platonism. It is composed on the 
 Petrarchian motif : 
 
 L'amante nel amato si trasforme 
 
 in the Triumph of Love. 
 
 "The lover, by virtue of so much thinking of it, transforms him- 
 self in the loved thing. I have nothing else to desire, as the desired 
 object is within myself. If my soul is transformed in it, what else 
 could the body obtain? It may rest with itself alone, as the other 
 soul is already tied to it. But this lovely and pure half-Goddess, who, 
 so perfectly as the accident to its subject, conforms herself to my 
 soul, is in my thought as the idea, and the live and pure love of 
 which I am made, as simple matter, seeks its form." 
 
 Transforma-se o amador na cousa amada, 
 Por virtude do muito imaginar: 
 Nao tenho logo mais que desejar, 
 Pois em mim tenho a parte desejada. 
 
 Se nella estS, minha alma transformada. 
 Que mais deseja o corpo de alcangar? 
 Em si s6mente pode descansar, 
 Pois com elle tal alma est3. liada. 
 
13 
 
 Mas esta linda e pura semid^a, 
 Que como o accidente em seu sujeito, 
 I Assi com a alma minha se confSrma, 
 
 Esta no pensamento como idfia; 
 
 E o vivo e puro amor de que sou feito, 
 
 Como a materia simples busca a forma. 
 
 — X. 
 
 He looks as a swan who would sing Ms last song 
 every day: 
 
 "The swan, when he feels that his last hour Is coming, spreads 
 with a doleful voice a greater harmony along the desert shores. 
 He wishes to enjoy a lengthier day and weeps its early flight. 
 Under the keen grief of departure, he celebrates the sad end of the 
 journey. So, my lady, when I saw the sad end reserved for my 
 devotion, finding myself without a thread of hope, I sang with 
 sweeter accent your disfavors, your false faith and my own love." 
 
 O cysne, quando sente ser chegada 
 A hora que p6e termo a sua vida, 
 Harmonia maior, com voz sentida, 
 Levanta por a praia Inhabitada. 
 
 Deseja lograr vida prolongada, 
 E della esta chorando a despedida: 
 Com grande saudade da partida, 
 Celebra o triste fim desta Jornada. 
 
 Assi, Senhora minha, quando eu via 
 O triste fim que davam mens amores, 
 Estando posto ja no extremo flo; 
 
 Com mais suave accento de harmonia 
 Descantei por os vossos desfavores 
 La vuestra falsa f§, y el amor mio. 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 Here is one that shows well how he imbibes in nature 
 all day long the poetry which he turns into love ca- 
 dences : 
 
14 
 
 The loveliness of these cool mountains, the shade of the verdant 
 chestnuts, the still flowing of the rivulets, from which all sadness is 
 banished afar; the hoarse sound of the sea, the strange land, the 
 setting of the sun behind the hills, the gathering of the late flocks, 
 the soft war of the clouds in the skies; in fine, all that incomparable 
 Nature offers with such variety, makes me only suffer, if I do not 
 see thee. Without thee all tires and displeases me; without thee I 
 am ever tasting, in the greatest joys, the greatest loneliness. 
 
 A formosura desta f resca serra, 
 E a sombra dos verdes castanhelros ; 
 O manso caminhar destes ribeiros, 
 Donde toda a tristeza se desterra: 
 
 O rouco som do mar, a estranha terra, 
 O esconder do Sol pelos outeiros, 
 O recolher dos gados derradeiros. 
 Das nuvens pelo ar a branda guerra: 
 
 Em flm, tudo o que a rara natureza 
 Com tanta variedade nos ofErece, 
 Me esta, se nao te vejo, magoando. 
 
 Sem ti tudo me enoja, e me aborrece; 
 Sem ti perpetuamente estou passando 
 Nas mores alegrias, m6r tristeza. 
 
 — CCLXXI. 
 
 We come to one of the most beautiful of his somieta, 
 the one telling of his separation from his beloved one, 
 whether forever or for days, no one knows. It is the 
 Sonnet 24 of his Rhythmas. This sonnet is located by 
 Braga on the morning of Camoens's exile from Lisbon, 
 and by Storck on the morning of his departure for 
 India; but are great events really necessary to make 
 two dividing lovers shed streams of- tears ? Does not 
 the shortest separation often appear tragic enough to 
 them, without any need of exile and persecution? This 
 is a point which lovers can judge better than critics. On 
 
IS 
 
 the face of it, it was a separation of whicli it can be said 
 that all was lost, but love. 
 
 "That early morning, so sad, yet so joyful, all full of sorrow and 
 of pity, as long as loving remembrance will exist on earth, I wish 
 it to be forever celebrated. It alone, when coming out fresh and 
 dappled to light the earth, saw the tearing away of two lovers, 
 whose wills shall never be divided. It alone saw running from 
 their eyes threads of tears, which joined into a large stream. It 
 alone heard the doleful words, which could render the Are cold and 
 give rest to the damned souls." 
 
 Aquella triste e l€da madrugada, 
 Cheia toda de m^goa.e de piedade, 
 Em quanto houver no mundo saudade, 
 Quero que seja sempre celebrada. 
 
 Ella so, quando amena e marchetada 
 Sahia, dando S, terra claridade, 
 Vio apartar-se de uma outra vontade. 
 Que nunca podera ver-se apartada. 
 
 Ella so vio as lagrimas em fio. 
 
 Que de uns e de outros olbos derlvadas, 
 
 Juntando-se, formaram largo rio. 
 
 Ella ouvio as palavras magoadas. 
 
 Que puderam tornar o fogo frio, 
 
 E dar descanso S.s almas condemnadas. 
 
 Here you see his force, his earnestness, his power of 
 moving the heart, so great that one can hardly realize 
 that so much emotion can hold within so few lines. 
 
 Here is another in the same strain, although with a 
 touch of resignation, which, strange to say, comes from 
 the loss of all hope : 
 
 "What more can I expect from the World, if having given it so 
 much love, I only got back discontent and disfavor, and finally death, 
 than which nothing could be more cruel. Since life does not 
 satiate me of living, and since I find that a great grief does not 
 
i6 
 
 kill, if there is anything that gives a stronger pain, I am ready to 
 try it, as I can endure all. Death to my great grief has insured me 
 against all possible calamities. I have lost her whom fear taught 
 me to lose. In life I received only unlove; in death, the great sorrow 
 that remains to me. It seems that only for this I was born." 
 
 Que poderei do Mundo ja querer, 
 
 Pois no mesmo em que puz tamanho amor, 
 
 Nao vi senao desgosto e desfavor, 
 
 E morte, em flm, que mais nao pode ser? 
 
 Pois me nao farta a vida de viver, 
 Pois j& sei que nao mata grande dor, 
 Se houver cousa que magoa de maior, 
 Eu a verei, que tudo posso ver. 
 
 A morte, a meu pezar, me assegurou 
 De quanto mal me vinha: ja perdi 
 O que a perder o medo me ensinou. 
 
 Na vida desamor sdmente vi; 
 Na morte a grande dor me ficou. 
 Parece que para isto so nasci. 
 
 I will read a last one, his celebrated sonnet 
 
 Alma minha gentil que te partiste, 
 
 considered the most beautiful of all. The story, as I 
 said, with the daughter of Dom Antonio de Lima makes 
 Camoens leave Portugal in her lifetime, and write his 
 sonnet on her death years afterwards in India. Braga 
 pretends that he wrote it as late as in 1561. If this 
 sonnet had been written in India on the delayed news 
 of the death of one seen for the last time years before, 
 as Braga believes, the verses would have more the char- 
 acter of a reminiscence than that of burning love, and 
 they would probably contain some mark of the poet's 
 sad wanderings and of the great work he was then ab- 
 sorbed in. 
 
17 
 
 This sonnet has been often translated into English 
 verse. The two first verses are nearly the same as 
 the first in Petrarea's sonnet 
 
 Quest'anima gentil che si departs, 
 Anzi tempo chiamata al altra vita; 
 
 but, if the start is the same, the flight is wholly differ- 
 ent: 
 
 "My own gentle soul, who so early hast departed disconsolate from 
 this life, may you enjoy forever the rest of heaven and I live here 
 on earth with my sorrow. If in the ethereal seat, to which thou didst 
 ascend, memories of this life are allowed, do not forget that ardent 
 love which thou hast seen so pure in my look. And if the grief, 
 that remains with me from the pain without remedy of losing 
 thee, deserves any reward, beseech God, who has shortened thy 
 years, to take me from here to see thee as quickly as from my 
 eyes He took thee." 
 
 Alma minha gentil, que te partiste 
 Tao cedo desta vida descontente, 
 Repousa IS, no Ceo eternamente, 
 E viva eu cS na terra sempre triste. 
 
 Se la no assento Kthereo, onde subiste, 
 Memoria desta vida se consente, 
 Nao te esquegas de aquelle amor ardente. 
 Que ja nos olhos mens tao puro viste. 
 
 E se vires que pode merecer-te 
 Alguma cousa a dor, que me ficou 
 Da mSgoa sem remedio de perder-te; 
 
 Roga a Deus, que tens annos encurtou. 
 Que tao cedo de cS me leve a ver-te, 
 Quao cedo de mens olhos te levou. 
 
 The melody of this short poem conld not be exceeded 
 in our language: in it the predominant sentiment of 
 the race, the saudade, finds its perfect expression. 
 
i8 
 
 j\ I should not leave Vassar College without trying to 
 '[plant here the word saudade. In the poems I have 
 read to you I met it many times, but how to translate a 
 sentiment that is not expressed in any other language 
 by a single word? That word of ours we claim to be 
 the most beautiful word of any language ; we consider 
 it the gem of human speech. It expresses the sad mem- 
 ories of life, but also its abiding hopes. The tombs 
 bear that inscription, saudade; the lovers' message to 
 ' each other is saudade; saudade, the message of the ab- 
 sent to his country and to his friends. Saudade, you see, 
 is the ivy of the heart, attached to its ruins and growing 
 , m its solitude. To render its meaning, you would have 
 If to take four English words : remembrance, love, grief 
 If and longing. Without any one of them you could not 
 .wholly express the feeling. Still saudade is simply a 
 [new form, polished by tears, of the word soledade, soli- 
 iltude, just as our word adeus, adieu, is the survival of 
 i;| the two words, once said as farewell : A Deus, A Dieu, 
 to God. "I commend thee to God." Solitude creates 
 loneliness; saudade is the feeling of loneliness, after 
 the loss of what kept company to one's heart: either 
 the country, the home, the friends, any whom we love 
 or loved, be that separation a passing one, or be it 
 death. Hence the infinite scale of the word to express 
 all states of mind characterized by the void of the loved 
 thing in one's soul. It is most singular that only 
 one human race has distilled from the word solitude 
 its impression over the heart; that only one possesses 
 a word for regret at loss or absence, mingled with the 
 wish to see again, and that only one has that sentiment 
 constantly on its lips. The word longing must have 
 been an attempt at a comprehensive word for the same 
 feeling, taken not from the word loneliness, but from 
 
19 
 
 the word longe, being apart, far away, but it did not 
 obtain the same triumph in English as saudade in 
 Portuguese, perhaps because of your race not being a 
 nostalgic one. Longing, indeed, is not the popular 
 coin of your language, while saudade is the soul, the es- 
 sence, of Portuguese, and gives to it the perfume of 
 a field of violets. That word is enough by itself to 
 show the solitary nature of the race, its homesickness, 
 its attachments to its early impressions, its innate sad- 
 ness, the sadness of those who never care for anything 
 future that has no roots in the pa^t. 
 
 Of the light, fancy verses of Camoens, the Letter to 
 a Lady gives a sufficient idea. It is a pure badinage, 
 but it shows how his imagination was as active in the 
 sports of his heart as in its pangs : 
 
 "Near the clear source of the Ganges the dwellers live on the 
 perfume of the flowers that grow on the hill. As the senses alone 
 can give food to life, it is no wonder, if those live by smelling, that 
 I live hy seeing you. 
 
 "There is a tree which gets so sad among the general content- 
 ment, that, when it is night, it blossoms and at daylight it loses its 
 leaves. Myself, who feel all the price of looking at you, I get sad 
 at your sight, as I know I do not deserve the glory of being sad. 
 
 "A King of great power trained himself with poison, so that he 
 would not suffer, if, as was the custom, it was ever given to him 'oy 
 others. With me, who since a child accustomed my sight to all 
 that is suffering, it happens that pain only hurts me, when absent. 
 
 "There is a disease of which one gets cured by a secret of nature 
 on the simple sight of a bird. From the illness which love fosters 
 within me, I would be cured by seeing that Phoenix, were it not for 
 the dropsy that remains of wishing more the more I get. 
 
 "Love, in order to keep its power, made a reluctant will enamoured 
 of a statue and then converted the statue into a woman. Whom 
 
20 
 
 could I complain of, or accuse of deceiving me, if I follow and seek an 
 image, which from human is turning herself into marble? 
 
 "If any one swears false on the wate'rs of a certain source, he 
 at once gets blind. You, tyrant of my freedom, you order, when 
 I speak the truth, that I see you no more. 
 
 "The palm is so hard and so strong that weight does not break 
 it; on the contrary, in its conceit, it rises still more when bended. 
 The harm you do me does not bend only my constancy, it bends also 
 my desire; yet, at once, I love you still more. 
 
 "If any one puts out the eyes of the swallow, the mother im- 
 mediately goes for an herb that makes others grow. I have my 
 eyes fixed on yours, which are stars: those of the understanding 
 got blind, but came those of reason, so that I could enjoy my 
 torment. 
 
 "While sailing towards the East we discovered a river and 
 wondered that the wood that fell in it was changed into stone. 
 Yet, it is greater wonder that a heart be converted into diamond 
 in a flow of tears. 
 
 "A dumb fish can impress on the line and on the rod such a 
 deadly shock that the arm of the angler will be paralized. If my 
 eyes begin to drink of this rapturous poison they will not be able 
 to move at anything else that appears. 
 
 "How many contradictions love causes to double our torments! 
 The same lovely sight, that makes me content, condemns me to sad- 
 ness, as the flame, that goes out with the wind, with the same wind 
 is kindled again." 
 
 Like the Italian poets, Camoens wrote also Cangoes, 
 Canzones. In these he was not limited to a small num- 
 ber of verses, and could let free his inspiration. They 
 are long talks with himself about his loves, his hopes, 
 and his desires, and nowhere the thrilling and melo- 
 dious kind of soul he possessed appears in such a light : 
 
 One of the most beautiful is the Cangao X, written 
 in the East, on the Arabian coast. I will read it in 
 
21 
 
 part. Braga calls it "the deepest expression of hu- 
 man grief." I would not say that, after the Psalms 
 and the Book of Job, and the Divine Comedy; I do not 
 compare love suiferings with the real tragedies of the 
 soul ; but I agree that the kind of grief there is in dis- 
 appointed love was never expressed in a more har- 
 monious and touching strain. 
 
 "Here I had no place where to lie, not a single hope on which a 
 moment to rest my head; all was for me pain, cause for suffering, 
 yet not for dying, as I had to undergo my whole fate, never once 
 appeased. These furious seas, I tame them with my sighs. These 
 winds, they seem to refrain, importuned by my voice. Only the 
 severe Heaven, and the stars, and the ever cruel fate find pleasure 
 in my eternal suffering, and in showing them.se'ves indignant against 
 a piece of clay, a vile worm of the earth. 
 
 If after so many labours I got at least to know for certain that 
 some hour I was remembered by the clear eyes which I once saw; 
 if this sad voice, breaking the distance could touch the angelic ears 
 of the one on whose sight I once lived, and if she turned a little 
 on herself, revolving In her anxious mind the times gone by of 
 my sweet faults, of the dear pains and wraths, suffered and 
 sought for her, and were she, however late, to become compassionate 
 and to weigh in her heart my woe, and within herself to think she 
 had been cruel to me. ... If I knew only that, it would be rest 
 for the life remaining to me and how would I caress my suffer- 
 ing! . . . Ah! Senhora! Senhora!" 
 
 "How rich you are, that here, so far away, you feed me with 
 joy only by such a sweet fiction! As soon as the thought portrays 
 you, all pain and all grief disappears. With your remembrance 
 only I feel safe and strong against death's fiercest countenance 
 and at once hopes flock to me, thanks to which the brow, rendered 
 more serene, converts the hardest torments into gentle and suave 
 longings. 
 
 Here I remain with my memories inquiring about you, from the am- 
 orous winds that blow from the parts where you dwell; asking the 
 birds, which there take their flight, if they saw you, what were you 
 doing and talking, where, how, with whom, what day and what 
 hour. And the tired life recovers new spirits, with which to win 
 fortune and toil, only to return to see you, to serve and to love you 
 
22 
 
 again. But the ardent desire, that never suffered delay, rashly 
 reopens the wounds of my suffering. 
 
 And thus I live. . . .If any one asked thee, my Canzone, why 
 I do not die, answer that because death is my life.'' 
 
 Now we come to the eleventh Cangao, certainly his 
 highest title as a love poet. You will first take into ac- 
 count the great difference between a Portuguese poem 
 and an English translation, and this one by a foreigner, 
 who learned your language at random, and then judge 
 by yourselves if it deserves or not the praise bestowed 
 upon it by his admirers. Dr. Wilhelm Storck, his Ger- 
 man coryphoeus, calls this Canzone "the queen of all 
 Canzones of all poets preceding or following Camoens 
 or his contemporaries. ' ' Richard Burton, his English 
 coryphoeus, agrees with the Morgado de Matteus, one 
 of the Portuguese worshippers of Camoens, in ranking 
 the Can§ao 
 
 Vinde cS,, meu tao certo Secretario, 
 
 with two others of his, higher than the finest Canzones 
 of Petrarca. I do not like ranking masterpieces. All 
 classification of them is only a personal caprice of the 
 critic. To be able to weigh comparatively the inspira- 
 tion of the most beautiful Canzones of Petrarca and 
 Camoens would require a poet superior to either, 
 possessing not only the gifts of both, but the 
 spirit of their two Ages and languages. A critic may 
 be a very unassuming person, but his profession, more 
 than that of the judge, as he makes his own law, is by 
 itself an assumption of superiority. Willing and rea- 
 soned admiration is never such a perfect tribute as the 
 unconscious one, that which does not know where it be- 
 gins and where it ends. I am content to say that the 
 
23 
 
 eleventh CanQao seems to me as beautiful a strain of 
 harmony as ever fell from a human instrument; that 
 no love tears glisten purer in Poetry than the ones 
 trembling forever in those verses. 
 
 "Come here, faithful Secretary of the complaints I am always 
 making, paper, on which I unload my heart. Let us tell the un- 
 reasons which the inexorable fate, deaf to tears and prayers, deals 
 me since I live. Let us throw a few drops of water on so much 
 fire and kindle with our outcries a torture new to all memories. 
 Let lis tell such wrong to God, to the world, to men, and, in fine, to 
 the winds, to which so many times I have confided it in vain, as 
 I am telling it now. But as I was born for endless errors, I do not 
 doubt that this will be one more of them. And since I am so far from 
 finding my right way, I should not be accused for erring also in this. 
 At least I have this one refuge for speaking and for erring, without 
 offense, freely. How sad he who is content with so little. 
 
 "I have long desisted from seeking cure in complaining; but 
 who suffers is forced to cry out, if the pain is excessive; I will shout, 
 though the voice is weak and small to relieve me, and that not even 
 with shouting the grief will abate. Who will grant me at least to 
 pour tears and infinite sighs, equal to the sorrow that dwells within 
 me? But who could ever measure grief by tears or cries? Still I will 
 tell thee that which wrath, pain and their recollection teach me. 
 . As no other pain is by itself harder or stronger. Come you, 
 who are in despair and listen to me, and let fly away those who 
 live on hope, or those who imagine themselves in it, because love 
 and fortune combine to leave them power to ascertain the true 
 measure of the woes that may befall them. 
 
 "When I came fresh to light from the maternal tomb, unhappy 
 stars at once put me in bondage, barring from me my true will; 
 I knew a thousand times in happiness the better and followed 
 constrained the worse. To give me ever torments conforming 
 with my years, they ordered that, when still an infant, I gently 
 opened my eyes, a blind boy would wound me. The tears of childhood 
 came already mingled with enamoured longings; my cries in the 
 cradle sounded to me like sighs. Destiny and age were in accord, 
 and when they rocked me with sad love songs, my nature at once 
 was lulled into sleep, so much akin was it to sadness. 
 
 "My nurse was some weird creature as destiny did not wish 
 that a woman had such name for me, nor was any who could. Thus 
 
24 
 
 was I suckled; I drank from a child the amorous poison that I 
 would drink in full age, so that it would not kill me hy my being 
 accustomed to it. Then I saw the image and the likeness of that 
 feral human creature so beautiful, who reared me at the breasts of 
 Hope, and of whom I afterwards saw the original, which makes 
 of my great errors a proud and sovereign sin. It seems it had the 
 human form, but it scintillated divine spirits. It had a demeanour 
 and a presence that all evil felt vain glory at its sight ;_ its shade 
 and light excelled the power of Nature. 
 
 "What a kind so new of torment had love, that was not only tried 
 on me, but wholly executed! Implacable harshness had ashamed 
 and shaken from its purpose the fervent wish, that gives strength 
 to thought. Here were phantastic shades, brought from some daring 
 hopes; with them the true blisses were also painted and feigned, 
 but the pain of the contempt which I received, putting every fancy 
 in confusion, disconcerted its ingenious dreams. My occupation 
 was to guess and to hold as truth what was guess, and then to 
 unsay myself in shame; in fine to lend a contrary sense to what I 
 saw, to find reasons for everything, — while the unreasons were much 
 more evident. 
 
 "I do not know if she knew that she was stealing my own vitals 
 with her rays and that they fled to her subtly through my eyes. 
 Little by little, invincibly, they went from me, just as the ardent 
 sun draws the subtle humours from the veil of the skies. In fine 
 the pure and transparent mien, compared to which this name of 
 "beautiful" remains without value, the sweet and compassionate 
 moving of the eyes, which held the souls in suspense, were the 
 magic herbs which Heaven made me drink and which for long years 
 have transformed me into another being, and I was so pleased with 
 seeing myself so changed, that I deceived my pains with my dreams, 
 and before my eyes I held a veil to hide from myself the growing 
 harm that was increasing within me, like one who was brought up 
 with caresses from him for whom he had grown. 
 
 "Who could paint the absent life, my discontent at all I saw; 
 my feeling always away from wherever I was; my speaking without 
 knowing what my words meant; my going without seeing through 
 where, and my sighing without knowing I was sighing, when 
 that state most tormented me, and I felt the pain that came to 
 the world from the waters of Tartarus, more severe than all others 
 and which used to convert soft grief into fiercest rage? Then mad 
 with pain, and not wishing to cease to love, I turned in another 
 direction for vengeance the wish deprived of hope, and which 
 hardly could be changed. Then the sweet remembrance of the 
 
25 
 
 past, a torment soft, pure, and doleful, came to convert those 
 furies into tears of love. 
 
 "What excuses did I not seek with myself alone when fond love 
 did not suffer me to find fault in the loved thing, and how dearly 
 loved! Such were the remedies imagined by fear of torment, which 
 taught my life to maintain Itself through snares. In this I passed a 
 part of it, and in that part, if I ever had one joy, short, imperfect, 
 timid and wrong, it was only the seed of a protracted and bitterest 
 torture. This continuous course of sadness, those steps vainly scat- 
 tered, went on extinguishing the ardent taste of those enamoured 
 thoughts which I had fixed so earnestly in my soul and with which I 
 had fed my tender nature. The latter through the long habit of ad- 
 versity, to which no human strength can resist, ended by turning to 
 the taste of feeling sad. 
 
 "Thus I went changing my life into another, not I, my own adverse 
 fate, and even so I would not have changed that life for any other. 
 It made me leave the loved paternal nest and cross the long sea, 
 which so many times threatened my life. Now experiencing the rare 
 fury of Mars, who wished me at once to touch in my own eyes his 
 bitter fruit, and in this escutcheon of mine you will see the picture of 
 the terrible Are. Now a pilgrim, wandering among the different Na- 
 tions, apart in languages, costumes and qualities, only to follow thee 
 Fortune, that consumest life's ages, carrying before each of them a 
 hope 'brilliant as a diamond, but which when it falls from thy hand 
 one recognizes to be only useless glass. 
 
 "Human pity failed me; I saw the friendly people hostile at my first 
 danger and in the second no land could I find where I could set my 
 foot; even air to breathe was denied me; I had not for me either 
 time or the world. What an arduous and deep mystery is this! To 
 be born to live and yet to be refused all that the world has to give 
 for life. And not to find a way of losing it, it being lost so many 
 times already! In fine there was no transe of fortune, nor peril, nor 
 doubtful cases, (injustices from those whom the confused law, the 
 ancient abuse of the world, renders powerful over other men), that 
 I did not bear, attached to the faitjhful column of my suffering, which 
 the importuning persecution of ill broke a thousand times to pieces 
 by the strength of its arms. 
 
 "I do not recall such suffering, as one who after a raging storm 
 tells of its wrecks inside a qiiiet port, as even now wavering for- 
 tune compels me to undergo so many miseries that I fear to take a 
 single step more. Already I do not recoil before any coming evil, nor 
 do I pretend to any good which may be failing me, as I find hu- 
 man cunning of no avail against fate. I am pending from a sov- 
 
26 
 
 ereign force, from Divine Providence. What I see and dream, 
 sometimes. I take it as a comfort for so many wrongs. But when 
 human frailty throws Its eyes on current fortune and only obtains a 
 memory of past years, what waters I then drink and what bread I 
 eat, are sad tears, which I never can control except by building in 
 the Imagination phantastic pictures of joy. 
 
 "If It were possible for time to turn backwards, as memory does, 
 over the traces of the first age and, webbing again the old story of 
 my sweet errors, it carried me amidst the flowers of the youth, 
 which I once saw, and, then the remembrance of the loved past be- 
 coming greater content for me, if I enjoyed again the suave and pleas- 
 ant talk where stood one and other keys of my present thought, the 
 fields, the walks, the signals, the sight, the snow, the rose, the beauty, 
 the grace, the sweetness, the courtesy, the simple friendship that de- 
 viates away all earthly and Impure intention, and the one like which 
 I never saw any other! Alas, vain memories! Whereto do you take my 
 frail heart, as I cannot yet well tame this useless desire of yours! 
 
 "No more, Cangao, no more, as I would speak like this for a thou- 
 sand years without feeling it, and if by chance they accuse thee of 
 being long and heavy, answer that the water of the sea cannot hold 
 in such a narrow vase. Nor do I sing those delicate points for love 
 of praise; I tell pure truths really lived by me. Would God they 
 were dreams!" 
 
 I think I have read tonight enough of Camoens to 
 give you the idea that he really deserves to be counted 
 among the greatest lyric poets. I believe the gems of 
 his poetry placed before you will last as long as the 
 other literary heirlooms of mankind. Modern reading 
 is so indiscriminate that the popularity of an author is 
 no test of his intrinsic value. One had better not touch 
 Homer, or Dante, or Camoens, if one has contracted the 
 habit of reading to kill time. To enjoy their company 
 we need the contrary habit of reading to treasure 
 up our passing hours in undying recollections. To 
 read the great authors of the past is a duty for all who 
 are real particles of the human intelligence. If one lets 
 his taste for the writings of the day absorb him, he 
 overlooks that sacred duty of watching over the pre- 
 
27 
 
 cious deposits of the human mind, of keeping fresh and 
 retentive the memory of our race, of increasiag its 
 touch with the past the more it drifts away from us. A 
 humanity, wholly interested in the present, losing grad- 
 ually its memory, unable to enjoy what should be its 
 greatest pleasure: that of living anew by recollection 
 in its ages of art and poetry and legend, would be a sad 
 sight, however great the material development around 
 it. Any shrinking of human imagination would be 
 fatal to mind and heart, however great might be the 
 increase of discovery. I do not think any such caution 
 from a stranger is needed at your hearth, no more 
 than one from a barbarian on the keeping of the pal- 
 ladium would be needed at the house of the Koman 
 Vestals. I simply explain my coming here to speak of 
 Camoens and not of the passing literature of the day. 
 I thought his name deserved to awake the echoes of 
 this Institution, which stands so far ahead of our 
 times, if the whole of mankind is considered. Immi- 
 gration was the greatest human fact of the nineteenth 
 century, and the social progress of woman will be 
 the greatest human fact of the twentieth. Both are 
 as yet principally American facts. As to the first, 
 the LusiADs can be called the Poem of Immigration. 
 As to the second, there is nothing expressed in it about 
 the idea that inspired the creation of Vassar College; 
 but if the means are left in the shade, the end is in full 
 light in the poem, and woman, as Camoens has drawn 
 her, is the noblest type that could be carved by cen- 
 turies of the highest education. To speak and to act 
 like his Venus, his Queen Maria ; to die like his Ignez de 
 Castro, or his Dona Leonor de Sa, supposes and re- 
 quires the crystallisation of the soul as a divine mirror, 
 which certainly would be the goal of education, if all 
 
28 
 
 education had not of necessity to be content with a 
 limit, in order to give a higher average. 
 
 Were love to be banished from life, from literature 
 and from art, the Lusiads, like the Iliad, and the 
 Odyssey, and the Bible, would cease to count for man- 
 kind ; but however supremely love might be purified by 
 Eeligion and moral dignity, the Lusiads would keep in- 
 tact its heat and its light. You will find in its poetry 
 the soul of the Eenaissance purified by the breath of 
 Chivalry. It is the poem of heroism as well as that of 
 love ; the poem of Neptune as the poem of Venus ; that 
 is, it represents the combined power of the two poles 
 of mankind: the masculine and the feminine. 
 
 In one single respect familiarity with the Lusiads 
 might be of some danger for women: it might make 
 them too conscious of their power. Already in the 
 relations of Venus with Jupiter at the beginning 
 the force of the womanly appeal shows itself ir- 
 resistible. Throughout the poem beauty and gentle- 
 ness operate miracles, which, although disguised under 
 mythological garb, are really symbolic of the power of 
 woman. But I thiak you are taught here not to abuse 
 that power. 
 
 Future alumnae of Vassar, I am glad to bring to you 
 the greetings of your fellow students of Brazil. Our 
 country has a title to your sympathy : she has paid the 
 highest posible compliment to woman by rejecting, 
 when a Monarchy, the Salic Law, and alone, of the 
 American nations, she was ruled over by a woman. 
 Among the daughters of our Continent none, except 
 your Mrs. Beecher Stowe, could claim precedence in 
 History before the Brazilian Princess, who at- 
 tached her name to our two great Acts for the Eman- 
 cipation of the Slaves. We are proud of the magnifi- 
 
29 
 
 cent part of the earth Grod gave to us and of many of 
 our national features, but by far our greatest pride is 
 the Brazilian woman, and our hope is that higher 
 education will enlarge her mind without touching at 
 her heart. We can well have that assurance, as this 
 is the greatest experience of Vassar College. 
 
 I feel most grateful to President Taylor for the great 
 opportunity he gave me of speaking to you of Camoens. 
 If I were to make a votive tablet for Matthew Vassar 
 in Camonian style I would only have to alter two 
 words of the stanza of the Lusiads in honor of the poet- 
 king Dom Diniz, the founder of Coimbra University : 
 
 "It was he who first caused the high craft of Minerva to be prac- 
 tised 6y woman and who made the Muses desert the Helicon to tread 
 the rich verdure of the Hudson. All that could be expected from 
 Athens is given here by proud Apollo; here he distributes the 
 wreaths of baccharis and evergreen laurel twined with gold." 
 
 —Ill, 97. 
 
 Fez primeiro em Coimbra exercitar-se 
 O valeroso officio de Minerva; 
 E de Helicona as Musas fez passar-se 
 A plzar do Mondego a fertll herva. 
 Quanto pode d' Athenas desejar-se, 
 Tudo o soberbo Apollo aqui reserva: 
 Aqui as capellas d& tecidas de ouro, 
 Do baccharo, e do sempre verde louro. 
 
 Ill, 97. 
 
THE LUSIADS AS THE EPIC 
 OF LOVE 
 
 Gentlemen of Cornell University : 
 
 For the third time I appear before an American 
 College as a Camonian Ehapsode; alas! not, like the 
 Greek Ehapsodes, to repeat the poet's own verses, but 
 tc translate them into foreign prose, taking away much 
 of his power. No doubt the highest part of Poetry is 
 thought, communicable from man to man through any 
 language, and therefore the Bible and the Iliad remain 
 the greatest of all works in whatever language they 
 may be translated. But if the essence of poetry is 
 thought, not sound, which is only a vehicle for it, the 
 question of impressing thought is a very important 
 one. The original verse, in the poet's own language, 
 has a direct grasp upon the memory and makes mind 
 resound with it throughout life, while the prose transla- 
 tion does not interest the auditive, the musical mech- 
 anism of mind. 
 
 The other night, at Vassar College, I made Camoens 
 introduce himself as a love singer. To-night he will ap- . 
 peal to you as the Poet of Love ; that is, you will see the 
 lyric poet changing into the epic. I hope these 
 Addresses on Camoens will call the" attention of 
 a few among the American students to one of the 
 greatest names of modern Literature and to the beauty 
 and poetry of our language. I am often asked to speak 
 in Spanish, so general is the belief here that in Brazil 
 we speak Spanish. The expression Spanish Anaerica is 
 
used here for the whole of Latin America. I have no 
 objection to it in the old historical sense of the word 
 Hispania, although we generally employ the word 
 Iberia in that sense. But Portuguese is a very distinct 
 language from Spanish, and was bound to have a dif- 
 ferent literature. Both are transformations of Latin, 
 with few signs of a different national formation be- 
 tween the two, but the ear of the Peninsula peoples that 
 divided into two Nations was somewhat different, and 
 the differences introduced by it in their common Latin 
 speech were sufficient to form languages of different 
 resonance. 
 
 There are words which are the exclusive flowers of 
 a language and which by their constant use, as some 
 trees show the kind of lands where they grow, reveal 
 the character of the race speaking that language, or 
 of the epoch when they come in full blossom. The 
 difference between Portuguese and Spanish could not 
 be better shown than by the predominance in Portu- 
 Xguese of the word saudade and its premature death in 
 Spanish. With reference to this word you should read 
 the note of Prof. Henry R. Lang, of Yale University, 
 in his book, Cancioneibo Gallbgo-Castelhano (pp. 199- 
 201). 
 
 The bulk of Portuguese, at the time of the founda- 
 tion of the Monarchy, was the Galician dialect, that is, 
 Latin as it was spoken in Galicia. Autonony under a 
 French ruler, Henry of Burgundy, brought about in 
 the new Lusitania a different national tendency, which 
 local influences widened each day. Spanish_shows the 
 Arabic influe nce_mnre tha,n.P!flriugae.gfi,-not perhaps so 
 much in the vocabulary as in its guttural harshness. 
 The greatest boast of the Portuguese language is 
 expressed by Camoens, explaining Venus 's love for. 
 
the Portuguese by their similitude with her old 
 Eomans, mainly in their language, "which, when she 
 thinks, seems to her with light corruption to be the 
 Latin." 
 
 E na lingua na qual quando imagina 
 Com pouca corrupeao ere que 6 a Latina. 
 
 'After saying a word on the language, I will say one 
 on the country. Small as Portugal was, her mark in 
 history may be well compared to that of Spain, as dur- 
 ing nearly a century the genius of navigation, the 
 secret of the Ocean, was hers. There is no name in 
 Portugal in the field of art to be opposed to Velasquez, 
 or Murillo, or Goya. She has no Cathedrals to be 
 compared to those of Burgos or Toledo. Nothing to 
 rival the Alhambra. Yet if you put all that together 
 in a scale of the balance, adding to it Don Quixote, and 
 put the Ltjsiads in the other, I doubt which would weigh 
 more, just as if all ancient Art was weighed against the 
 Iliad, I believe Homer's scale would remain im- 
 movable. 
 
 You know the Poet's life. There is nothing of im- 
 portance added to it since Longfellow's sketch. His 
 ancestors possessed a manor in Galicia, and to it is 
 attached the legend of the bird called camao, which 
 would die of grief if it saw unfaithful the lady of the 
 house, as he says in one of his love-verses. 
 
 Experimentou-se algum' hora 
 Da ave, que chamam camao. 
 Que se da casa onde mora 
 Vg adultera a Senhora 
 Morre de pura paixao . 
 
 Let US hope that the bird which gave his name to the 
 family justified the wronged lady before her husband 
 
and that they took his name out of gratitude for him. 
 But, one way or the other, the legend shows that love 
 was an influence with the Camoens. With the poet it 
 was a fatal influence, except that it fed him, so to say, 
 from the cradle to do the great work of his life. Love 
 was the cgjise.-&f--M-e--e5Se^rcmriisb€«i-, of his relega- 
 fionTo Africa, of his imprisonment, of his engagement 
 for India, of all his adversities, but the cause also of 
 his glory. It kept him in a kind of useless life, which 
 was, however, the only one fit to produce his immortal 
 masterpiece. There is nothing sure about his loves, 
 except that he was always unfortunate in them and that 
 he never repented of loving. There is a tendency to 
 reduce them all to one, bu,t we really do not know how 
 many they were, nor the difference of intensity and 
 earnestness between them. No one can say if his 
 references are to the same person, nor who she was. 
 No doubt one love which he depicts as a life af- 
 fair, writing in his maturity, eclipses the others, but 
 he might have forgotten. Worst of all, it is impossi- 
 ble to identify the young lady to whom his most beau- 
 tiful and saddest complaints went. Several young 
 women of his time have their champions, although 
 none appears herself as a postulant for glory. 
 
 Of all rival claims that is the most delicate for one 
 to arbitrate upon, as there is the risk of robbing a 
 woman of her immortality. I do not know if it is quite 
 safe to limit the selection to the ladies of the Court 
 named Catherina, although Catherina, whoever she 
 was, may remain her name for history, her literary 
 pseudonym. There is no allusion by the hand of 
 Camoens himself to any Catherina; the name was 
 brought out before posterity long after his death, and 
 comes from no document whose authenticity one could 
 
really ascertain. All that can be said is that he wrote 
 verses to one Catherina, unless he wrote them to two. 
 The Queen being a Catherina, the young Catherinas 
 certainly abounded in the Court. 
 
 In his youth and prime Camoens was a constant 
 writer of love-verses, and only the misfortunes of his 
 life, caused probably by the daring of his love ambi- 
 tions, would make him soar so much higher. Some in- 
 discretion in his love affairs caused his exile from the 
 Eoyal Court, and, after it, his enlistment to fight the 
 Moors in Africa, where he was wounded and lost one 
 of his eyes. This wound marks an epoch for the Por- 
 tuguese literature. His hopes as a general courtier 
 were dispelled by it, his pride as a lover was withered, 
 and he felt at the mercy of anyone who looked at his 
 disfigured face. He calls himself "Polyphemus," 
 while his beloved one is ' ' Galatea. ' ' It makes all dif- 
 ference in love if one receives a deformity. 
 
 It is impossible not to notice the strange means that 
 Fate employs to bring the Poets to give their best, as 
 fortime does not bring forth the same kind of work 
 as misfortune, and there is nothing more pathetic than 
 the soaring above circumstances, by which genius in- 
 sists in serving his inspiration. In fact, the great poet, 
 as a hmnan creator, leads a double and contrary life : 
 enjoying real bliss in the companionship of his creat- 
 ures during his greatest personal sorrows, and suffer- 
 ing agonies with them during his own raptures. "With- 
 out Milton's blindness his Paradise would have been a 
 very different composition, and without Camoens' dis- 
 figurement his poetical work would probably have all 
 been of the personal kind. It was that wound that 
 made him give up in despair love, court life, Lisbon, 
 Portugal, and to open his sail in the direction of the 
 
6 
 
 LusiADs. Nearly all great men would have preferred 
 power, honors, success in life, the pleasures of wealth, 
 to everlasting fame, if left to themselves. It is fate 
 that, for their sake, either persecutes them from the 
 outside, or turns them into their own persecutors. I 
 do not know how it will be henceforth. Among the 
 many new departures brought about in our times, there 
 is the creation of a literary profession. What was be- 
 fore a vocation is now a lucrative career. Only a very 
 high conscience will stop a dealer on the way to for- 
 tune from taking advantage of the public favor and 
 from watering his inspiration. I am afraid that opu- 
 lence will upset all the noble traditions of a craft, 
 which misfortune has played so large a part in purify- 
 ing and subliming. It is true that the cycle of Litera- 
 ture seems to be already closed, the goal of the human 
 ideal having been attained in it, as well as in Painting, 
 Sculpture, Architecture, Music and Religion. 
 
 During years and years Camoens was a Petrarca, 
 finding in his own feelings an endless source of poetry. 
 He grew a poet of the higliest order, drawing only 
 upon his loves, until he wrote that inimitable Can§ao 
 (Canzone) the eleventh, which of all his lyric poems I 
 would like to read to you for you to understand better 
 how and why love had the greatest part in the inspira- 
 tion of the LxTSiADs. It is such a strain of harmony as 
 rarely came from the heart of a poet, passing in re^dew 
 his life, all given to love, and all spent in false hopes 
 and wasted affections. I did not bring it, because there 
 would be no time during this address for you to forget 
 the man and follow serenely the evolution of the poet. 
 
 In despair of finding protection and good- will around 
 him, Camoens, to save himself from the prison where 
 he was confined, enlisted for military service in India 
 
and left Portugal in the spring of 1553. It was a long 
 voyage of about six months, much exposed to ship- 
 wreck, and to fatal diseases. During that voyage he 
 gathered the inspiration of the Lusiads ; not, probably, 
 that he then had the conception of the Poem, but that 
 he conceived the part which the sea and the ship-life 
 will play in it. Then, in India, the voyage of Vasco da 
 Gama, who opened those seas, grows on him and be- 
 comes the tie of the whole composition. Its aim is 
 to celebrate the doings of the Lusiads, the progeny of 
 Lusus, son of Bacchus. When he was shipwrecked, at the 
 mouth of the Mekong, between 1559 and 1560, his Poem 
 was as good as complete. There is no reason for dis- 
 missing the legend that he worked on it during his 
 stay at Macao in China. The filial piety of the Portu- 
 gese-speaking races will forever remain attached to 
 that far-Eastern shrine. He may have added to the 
 Poem during his stay in Mozambique, in 1567, and until 
 its publication ; but the time that the inspiration of his 
 work lasted, cannot have been so long as his stay in 
 India. It is a law of genius that the same inspiration 
 cannot remain unbroken for many years, much less for 
 a whole life. 
 
 The three principal factors in the composition of the 
 L usiads are the. pp^Ps Tip-liabit " of To ve^Tiis' reffl^^^^^ ex- 
 trajordinary stores of classic knowledge, and his na- 
 tionalamMtion,.. There is a tradition that, either in 
 Sofala or Mozambique, Camoens woke up a morning in 
 great joy, saying he would write a great song, as if the 
 idea and the plan of the Lusiads had been revealed to 
 him. I can well believe in this eureka the moment 
 that the national ambition struck the immense material 
 he had accumulated and the fountain of poetry he had 
 
8 
 
 in his mind. That morning the personal phase of the 
 poet ended. Art turned love, which had been for him 
 a personal obsession, into a divine sense; converted 
 the poisonous blade, with which he only tortured him- 
 self, into the chisel, that would carve the national 
 Poem. 
 
 I comnaented at Yale University on six great impres- 
 sions of the LusiADs: country worship; the poetry of 
 the sea ; mythology ; the age of discovery ; the spirit of 
 the Eenaissance, and, lastly, the law of the greatest 
 effort in life. I reserved to present it at some other 
 time, which happens to be now, as the poem of love, 
 and I hope to have still an occasion, in my wanderings 
 as its propagandist, to turn to the light other of its most 
 brilliant facets. In deed, if you study the JjusiAi)s^„yxm- 
 will. see..that-twaparalM -chains run 4hrough..it : there 
 is._thg. patriotic-chain -and the Jave-chain, each with its 
 distinct summits, such as, for the first : the Invocation 
 to Dom Sebastian, the battle of Ourique, the battle of 
 Aljubarrota, Dom Manoel's dream, the departure of 
 Vasco da Gama from Belem, the doubling of the Cape 
 of Good Hope, to speak only of the first Cantos, and as 
 for the love chain, those truly radiant summits : Venus 
 before Jupiter in the first Canto, Ignez de Castro in 
 the third, Adamastor in the fifth, the forge of Cupid 
 and the Isle of Love in the ninth. 
 
 You will excuse me for translating myself what I will 
 read to you. There are several translations of 
 Camoens in English verse, but in all of them there 
 is a strong collaboration of the translator with him, 
 and I like him better alone. It is invaluable the service 
 they have done for him, they make many read him who 
 would not have read him in English prose, and I owe 
 much to them in my own translations, but I think the 
 
true poetry of the Ltjsiads, when deprived of its music, 
 appears better in foreign prose. 
 
 To show that the Ltjsiads is the poem of Love, it is 
 enough to say that it is the poem of Venus. Camoens 
 did not fear the JEneid, and all who compare his Venus 
 with that of Vergil will agree that the question : Which 
 of the Venuses is the most beautiful? is an insoluble 
 problem in literature, as it is in Statuary or Painting. 
 The pictures of Venus by Camoens are the pendant in 
 poetry of the frescoes of Venus in the Farnesina by 
 Raphael. With her, all throughout the poem, the power 
 of love is made to appear the dominant force of the 
 Universe. 
 
 After the incomparable picture of Venus in the sec- 
 ond Canto, the great love page of the Lusiads is the 
 tale of Ignezjde Castro. The story of Ignez de Castro, 
 called, from her long neck, Collo de Garga, Heron 's Neck, 
 is widely known. She was a young dame at the service of 
 Dona Constanga, the wife of Prince Dom Pedro, heir to 
 Bang Affonso IV. The Princess died shortly after her 
 marriage and for ten years Dom Pedro and Inez thought 
 only of enjoying their love in the greatest privacy. The 
 possibility of her ascending the throne together with 
 his son incensed the old King against her and rival 
 courtiers, by his order or with his consent, killed her 
 in Coimbra in the absence of her lover. The tradition 
 of the time is that they had been secretly married. A 
 few years after her death, the Prince, coming to the 
 throne, took a most cruel vengeance on those of her 
 murderers who could not escape him, and had her re- 
 mains removed from Coimbra and given a royal tomb 
 at the Monastery of Alcobaga, where she lies by his 
 side. The legend sung by Camoens is that he crowned 
 
10 
 
 her in deatli and that her exhumed body received the 
 vasselage of the nobility and the people seated by his 
 side in all the pomp of royalty. The whole history of 
 Eoyalty does not record a similar coronation. 
 
 I will read you the episode of Ignez de Castro, only 
 being sorry that you cannot hear it in the melodious 
 and pathetic stanzas of Camoens. 
 
 "That prosperous victory once over, AfEonso returned to his own 
 realm to enjoy peace with so much glory as he had won in the 
 hard fought war, when occurred the sad case, worthy its fame,, 
 which lifts up the dead from their tombs, of the frail and unhappy 
 maid, who was made a Queen after her death. 
 
 "Thou alone, pure love, with that crude force which binds to its 
 win every human heart, were the cause of her being murdered, as if she 
 were an enemy of thine. If it is said, cruel love, that thy thirst is 
 not even quenched with the saddest tears, it is because, harsh tyrant, 
 thou wishest thy altars bathed with human blood. 
 
 "Thou wert resting, fair Ignez, in perfect quiet, enjoying the sweet 
 fruit of thy youth, in that gay and blind delusion of the soul, which 
 Fortune does not allow to last, there in the never forgotten meadows 
 of the Mondego, never dry of the tears of thy lovely eyes, teaching 
 the hills and the shrubs the name thou hadst engraved in thy 
 breast. 
 
 "Therein answered thee the remembrances which always dwelt in 
 the soul of thy Prince, and which ever brought thee 'back to his 
 eyes, when apart from thy fair ones: by night in pleasant lying 
 dreams, by day, in thoughts, that flew away; but all that he dreamt 
 or saw Were memories of your common happiness. 
 
 "He refuses the much desired nuptials of other fair Ladies and 
 Princesses, as thou, pure Love, scornest everything when a suave 
 mien captivates thee. Seeing those enamoured whims, the grave 
 old father who respects the murmuring of his people and the 
 freedom of his son who will not marry, 
 
 "Determines to take Ignez away from the world to take from 
 her his enchained son, believing that only the blood of an unworthy 
 death could extinguish the burning fire of his firm love. What mad- 
 ness let the fine sword, which had sustained the whole weight of 
 the Moorish fury, be raised against a feeble and delicate woman! 
 
 "The horrible hangmen were bringing her before the King, already 
 moved to compassion, but the people with false and ferocious reasons. 
 
II 
 
 persuaded him again to the foul murder, when she began to en- 
 treat the cruel grandfather, with sad and pitiful words inspired by 
 the regret and remembrance of her Prince and of their little 
 children whom she had to forsake, which grieved her more than 
 death itself. 
 
 "Raising her tearful eyes to the crystalline skies, as her hands 
 were being tied by the hard and pitiless Ministers, and then bringing^ 
 them down upon her children so dear and so sweet, whose fate as 
 orphans dismayed her, she thus addressed the King: 
 
 "If already wild beasts, whose minds nature has made so cruel 
 from birth, and birds of prey, only intent on aerial rapine, have 
 shown so tender feelings towards little children, as with the mother 
 of Ninus and the twin founders of Rome; 
 
 "Thou who hast the features and the heart of a man, if it is of a 
 man to murder a feeble and defenseless girl, only for having sub- 
 dued the heart of him who succeeded in winning her, respect these 
 little children, since thou dost not stop before her own dark death; 
 let thyself be moved by compai Vion of me and of them, since it does 
 not move thee my being innocent. 
 
 "And if, overcoming the Moorish resistance, thou knowest how to 
 deal death by iron and fire, learn also how to deal life by clemency, to 
 one who did not commit any fault to forfeit it. Still if my innocence 
 deserves so much from thee, place me in a perpetual and wretched 
 exile, in cold Scythia or in burning Lyberia, where I may ever live 
 in tears. 
 
 "Place me where all ferocity would await me, amidst lions and 
 tigers, and I will see if I can find in them the pity I did not find 
 in human breasts. There with intrinsic love, and with all my 
 will put in him for whom I die, I will rear up these relics of him, 
 which you saw here, as a relief for the lonely mother." 
 
 "The benign King wished to pardon, moved as he was by words 
 that pierced him; but the stubborn people and her fate did not 
 forgive her. Holding such a deed to be right, they drew their 
 swords of fine steel. O butcherly hearts, how fierce you show your- 
 selves against a lady, you knights! 
 
 "As against the lovely maiden Polyxena, the last solace of 
 her aged mother, the cruel Pyrrhus arms himself with his sword, 
 because the shade of Achilles condemns her, and she, as the patient 
 and sweet lamb, offers herself to the sacrifice, resting her eyes, 
 which calm the air around, upon her unhappy mother, mad with 
 grief. 
 
 "Thus against Ignez the brute murderers, bathing their blades 
 in the neck of alabaster which sustained the works with which 
 Love killed with love him who later will make her a Queen, and 
 
12 
 
 tinging with blood the white flowers she had watered with her 
 tears, glowed with fury, not dreaming of the future avengement. 
 
 "Well mightest thou, O Sun, have diverted that day thy rays from 
 their eyes, as thou didst from the dire table of Thyestes, when he 
 ate his own children through the hand of Atreus. You, concave 
 valleys, that could hear the last sounds from her cold mouth, 
 you echoed for long spaces the name of her Pedro. 
 
 "So as the candid and lovely daisy, cut before time, loses its per- 
 fume and its hues, spoiled by the heedless hand of the maid who 
 had it in her wreath, so lies dead the pale young damsel, the roses 
 of her cheek all faded, her white live color gone with her sweet 
 life. 
 
 "Weeping, the daughters of the Mondego, long remembered the 
 sombre death and, as an eternal memorial, converted the wept tears 
 into a pure fountain. They gave it the name, which still lasts, of 
 the loves of Ignez spent on its banks. See what a fresh spring bathes 
 the flowers! Its waters are tears and its name Love." 
 
 This is the end of the story of Ignez de Castro. Now 
 the two stanzas in which the Poet sketches the reign 
 of her husband, called Dom Pedro o Cru, Dom Pedro- 
 the-Hard. The death of Ignez traced out his mission as 
 that of an exterminator of crime. 
 
 "Not much time elapsed before Pedro wreaked the vengeance of 
 his mortal wounds, since he fell upon the fugitive murderers as soon 
 as he took the reins of power. They were surrendered to him by 
 another Pedro, most cruel, as the two had no pity for human life 
 and made between them the dire and unjust compact which Augustus 
 made with Lepidus and Anthony. 
 
 "This one was rigorous chastiser of robberies, of murders and of 
 adulteries; his most certain solace was to commit cruelties in his 
 wrath against the bad ones, while. In his justice, keeping cities free 
 from the oppression of the powerful lords. He gave death to more 
 robbers than wandering Alcldes and Theseus." 
 
 There are not among the royal tombs ia Europe any 
 two linked together by such strong tie of poetry as 
 the twin ones, of Dom Pedro, called the Hard, and the 
 sweet posthumous Queen, Dona Ignez de Castro, at 
 Alcobaga. Nor is there a more poetical spot than the 
 
13 
 
 Quinta das Lagrimas, in Coimbra, the Quinta of Tears, 
 with its stately trees and its waters, consecrated to the 
 imperishable legend of the loves of Ignez. 
 
 You all have heard of the greatest creation of 
 Camoens in the Lusiads, the huge and ugly giant who 
 had the guard of the Cape of Storms. In a book of 
 1803, Clarke's Peogkess of Maeitime Discovery, a true 
 monument to the Portuguese achievements, there is a 
 frontispiece plate entitled the Spectre of the Cape, 
 which is a worthy illustration of the episode of Ada- 
 mastor. A gigantic dark cloud hangs over the Cape 
 tableland, the storm flashes in the East, Vasco da 
 Gama's ship, with her foresail torn to pieces, plunges 
 on a quaking sea. There is all around a display of 
 the furies of Nature that corresponds to the verses: 
 ' ' What threat from Heaven or what secret does this cli- 
 mate and this sea present to us that appears mightier 
 even than tempest?" 
 
 Que ameago divino ou que segredo 
 Este clima e este mar nos apresenta 
 Que m6r cousa parece que tormenta? 
 
 What is characteristic of Camoens is that while he 
 makes of Adamastor a horrid evocation, with "a 
 frowning visage, a squalid beard, deep-sunk eyes, an 
 awful posture, the colour pale and earthy, the crispy 
 hair loaded with clay, the mouth black and the teeth 
 deep yellow, ' ' and while he personifies in him the blind 
 and relentless forces that opposed the advance of man 
 on sea, he gives him the tenderest heart that any lover 
 ever had. Even m his terrifying prophecies the giant 
 shows himself sensible to the woes of love, as in his 
 touching picture of the death of Sepulveda and of his 
 beautiful young wife in the sands of Africa. The part 
 
14 
 
 he is made to play, of barring the sea gate of the Bast,^ 
 does not leave so deep impression on us as the tale of 
 his love, upon which even eternity seems to have no 
 power. Poetry for Camoens, if not limited to love, was 
 always convertible into love, at its higher power. 
 
 Modern literature has added no myth but this one 
 to the grand series of Homer and Hesiod. Adamastor 
 i^, as Ignez de Castro^ on€!„QLih&.ti:i»^phs--ef4eve4H: 
 the LusiAJDs7 "I wiU translate the narrative which the 
 giant makes of his metamorphosis, for you to say if 
 ancient Poetry left a finer creation than this. Truly 
 the age capable of adding to the old Mythology a myth 
 that would have enriched it, richly deserves the name of 
 Eenaissance. 
 
 "I am that hidden and great Cape which you named of Tempests, 
 never Icnown to Ptolemy, Pomponius, Strabo, Pliny, nor to any of 
 those who passed. . . . Here I end all the African coast on this 
 my never seen promontory, which extends towards the Antarctic 
 Pole, whom your presumption now so much offends. 
 
 "I was one of the fiercest sons of Earth, like Enceladus, ..^geus 
 and the Centiman; my name was Adamastor, and I took part in the 
 war against him that hurls Vulcan's bolts; not that I piled hill 
 upon hill, but, conquering the waves of the ocean, I was Captain of 
 the sea, where wandered the fleet of Neptune, which I was pursuing. 
 
 "Love for the noble spouse of Peleus led me to undertake such 
 great enterprise. I scorned all the goddesses of Heaven only to 
 love the princess of the waters. One day I saw her with the 
 daughters of Nereus come out all bare on the shore and at once my 
 will was so enslaved that even now I do not feel anything that I 
 long so much for. 
 
 "As it would be impossihle to obtain her through the ugly huge- 
 ness of my face, I determined to take her by arms and I told Doris 
 of my intent. The Goddess in dread speaks to her for me, but she 
 with an honest and candid laughter replied: 'What love of a Nymph 
 would be enough to bear that of a giant?" 
 
 " 'Still to free the ocean from so much war, I will seek a way to 
 excuse my honour and to avoid the harm.' The messenger brought 
 me that answer, and, as the lover's blindness is great, I would not 
 
15 
 
 see the snare and my bosom was filled with abundance of raptures 
 and hopes. 
 
 "Fooled, renouncing already war, one night promised by Doris, I 
 saw at a distance the beautiful form of the white Thetis, alone un- 
 robed. Like mad, I run from afar, opening my arms to her who was 
 the life of this body, and I begin to kiss her lovely eyes, her cheeks. 
 and her hair. 
 
 , "Oh, from humiliation I hardly can say more. Thinking I had in 
 my arms the loved one, I found myself embracing a rugged moun- 
 tain of the harshest wood. Standing, face to face, before a stone 
 which I clasped for the angelic figure, I remained not a man, but 
 deaf and motionless, and close to a rock, another rock. 
 
 "Oh, Nymph the most fair of the ocean, since my presence does 
 not please thee, what would it cost to keep me in this deceit, were 
 it mountain, cloud, dream or nought? Raging and well nigh insane 
 from the grief and the shame suffered there, I left in search of 
 another world where none would scoff at my tears and my despair. 
 
 "Meanwhile my brethren were vanquished and in extremest 
 misery placed, some, for the greater surety of the Gods, lying 'oe- 
 neath various superposed mountains, and, as against Heaven hands 
 are of no avail, I began, while weeping my misfortune, to receive 
 from an enemy Fate the penalty for my audacity. 
 
 "My flesh is converted into solid earth, my bones into rocks, and 
 these limbs, which thou seest, and this form were extended along 
 these long waters; at last, my enormous stature was changed by the 
 Gods into this remote Gape and, to double my woes, Thetis is 
 surrounding me with her waves." (V, 50-59.) 
 
 It is with a full hand that he scatters love in his 
 poetry. This touch, for instance, in the description of 
 a storm: 
 
 "The alcyon birds raised their melancholy song near the wild 
 coast, remembering their own fate caused by the furious waves; 
 the enamoured Dolphins entered the sea caverns for shelter against 
 the fierce winds, which do not let them remain secure even in the 
 deep." (VI, 77.) 
 
 "As halcyoneas aves triste canto 
 Juncto da costa brava levantaram, 
 Lembrando-se de seu passado pranto. 
 Que as furiosas aguas Ihe causaram. 
 Os delphins namorados entretanto 
 
i6 
 
 La nas covas maritimas entraram, 
 Fuglndo S. tempestade, e ventos duros, 
 Que nem no fundo os delxa estar seguros." 
 
 When Venus sees from her morning star the 
 danger of her favorite crew, she at once bids her 
 Nymphs go and conquer the winds. 
 
 "And so it was done, for as soon as the winds come into their 
 sight, the strength with which they were fighting fails them and 
 surrendering they obey. It seems that their hands and feet were 
 tied by tresses that dim the light." 
 
 And the poet tells us the sweet reproaches of Orithya 
 "the most beautiful" to Boreas: 
 
 "Do not believe, wild Boreas, that I believe thou ever felt for me 
 a constant love, as sweetness is the surest array of love and fury 
 does not suit a true lover. If thou dost not put at once a rein to 
 so much insanity, do not hope me henceforth to love you, but only 
 to fear you, as with thee love is turned into fright." 
 Copy Lusiads 6°, Canto LXXXIX. 
 
 "Nao creias, fero Boreas, que te creio 
 Que me tiveste munca amor constante; 
 Que brandura 6 de amor mais certo arreio, 
 B nao convem furor a flrme amante: 
 Se ja nao poes a tanta insania freio, 
 Nao esperes de mi d'aqui em diante. 
 Que possa mais amar-te, mas temer-te; 
 Que amor comtigo em mSdo se converte." 
 
 I will only mention another intervention of Venus, 
 when she and the nymphs put their breasts in front of 
 the Portuguese ships to save them from running to 
 certain destruction. I said at Yale that Camoens con- 
 Terted Grama's log-book into poetry. In this case he 
 made use of an incident related in the Eoteiro of Vasco 
 da Gama that, his ship being reluctant to turn round, 
 when he ordered the dropping again of the anchor, the 
 
17 
 
 native pilots threw themselves overboard for fear that 
 their planned treachery had been discovered. 
 
 Everything he touches becomes poetry because of 
 that ray of love. Vasco da Gama arrives in Meliade on 
 an Easter Sunday. Here it is how he dates the event : 
 
 "It was at the joyful time when the Phobeian light was entering 
 the ravisher of Europa and began to Illumine both its horns, while 
 Flora poured forth that of Amalthea." 
 
 That is the spring with its sun and its flowers. 
 
 "The speedy sun, turning round the sky, was again renewing the 
 memory of the day In which He to whom everything is subject pnt 
 his seal to all he had done." 
 
 That is the Resurrection. 
 
 Now the description of Cupid's love forge in the Idal- 
 ian mountains. Camoens is really a combination of 
 two souls: he is a Greek poet, as well as a modem one. 
 Cupid's forge is worth the Greek imagination in all its 
 freshness. Here is the new Camonian myth: 
 
 "She (Venus) arrays her chariot with the birds (the swans) who 
 celebrate in life their own exequies and with those (the doves) 
 into which Peristera was changed while gathering daisies. . . . 
 Around the departed goddess sound in the air kisses of love, but, 
 where she passes with a soft gesture she makes serene the skies and 
 the winds. 
 
 "She already bends her chariot over the Idalian mountains, 
 where her archer son was assembling many others to make a 
 famous expedition against the rebel world to mend great errors 
 being committed there by people who love things which were given 
 to man, not for love, but for use. 
 
 "He saw Acteon so austere in the chase, so blind with its brutal 
 and insane joys, that, to follow a fierce ugly beast, he flies all 
 company and the beautiful human form, and as a chastisement, 
 both sweet and severe, Cupid wishes to show to him the lovelineee 
 of Diana. Let him beware not to be devoured by those same 
 hounds he now loves! 
 
i8 
 
 "He looks to the highest of the world; none thinks of the public 
 welfare; their love is all for themselves and those for whom Phil- 
 autia (self-love) teaches them to have regard; he sees those who 
 frequent the royal palaces sell for good and sound doctrine only 
 adulation, which does not consent that the young growing corn 
 (the young King Dom Sehastiam) should be winnowed. 
 
 "He sees that those who owe divine love to poverty and charity 
 to the people, only love power and riches, simulating justice and 
 integrity; they turn ugly tyranny into right and call asperity sever- 
 ity. Laws are enacted in favour of the King, and only perish 
 those In favour of the .people. 
 
 "He sees, in fine, that none loves what he ought to love, but only 
 what he wrongly wishes. He does not think the punishment should 
 be any longer delayed, but that it must come hard and just, and 
 summons therefore his Ministers to take a sufficient army for the 
 fights he expects to have with the ill-governed race, who will not 
 show obedience to him. 
 
 "Many of these flying boys are engaged in different works, some 
 sharpening penetrating irons, others thinning arrow stems; and, 
 while working, they sing of love, modulating in verse different epi- 
 sodes, with a sonorous and well adjusted melody, the lay sweet and 
 the song angelical. 
 
 "In the immortal furnaces where they were forging the piercing 
 points of their arrows, instead of wood, hearts were burning, many 
 of the l^uman vitals still palpitating; the waters, where they tem- 
 pered the iron, were tears of unhappy lovers; the vivid flame, the 
 never dying fire, was only desire that burns, yet not consumes." 
 
 And in four stanzas more he describes the effects 
 produced among the lowest and the highest of mankind 
 by the shots of the little army of Cupid's "ill-trained 
 boys" and the description of Love's workshop con- 
 tinues until Venus alights from her chariot, in the 
 stanza 36 of the ninth Canto. 
 
 This stanza could be given to you in Portuguese as 
 a taste of the music of the language, and of the Poet's 
 sonority. I do not think there are many others in the 
 Poem that show the qualities of Portuguese to greater 
 advantage. I will give it in parts. I will read the first 
 four verses, not surpassed in any language for their 
 rhythm, and which form a most ideal picture. 
 
19 
 
 Mas ja no verde prado o carro leve 
 Punham os brancos cysnes mansamente, 
 E Dione, que as rosas entre a neve 
 No rosto traz, descia dlligente. 
 
 "Already in the green meadows the white swans softly depose the 
 light chariot, and Dione, in whose face roses blossom amid snow, 
 promptly alights." 
 
 And the Poem ends with that wonderful apotheosis 
 of Love, the Isle of Love, which Venus makes appear 
 before the Portuguese ships and where herself and the 
 Nymphs feast the heroes for their discovery of the 
 new world. I have often referred to that immense 
 poetical fresco, without its equal in literature, which 
 stands to the gardens of Armida as Nature to enchant- 
 ment. 
 
 I will read onl j^ the beginning of it : 
 
 "Prom far they saw (the Portugese heroes) the cool and beautiful 
 isle which Venus was pushing to them through the waters, as the 
 wind pushes the white sail, so that they could not fail to see it. 
 But as soon as she saw that they had sighted the island and were 
 sailing to it, she made it firm and immovable, as Delos remained 
 while Latona gave birth to Apollo and Diana. At once the prows cut 
 the sea turned to where the coast forms a little bay, curved and 
 quiet, whose white sands Cytherea paints with rosy shells. 
 
 "In the lovely and delightful isle three beautiful hills were seen 
 rising with a graceful pride and all enamelled with grass; clear 
 fountains spring from the summit, covered 'with shining verdure, 
 and the fugitive sonorous water glides softly amid the white 
 pebbles. 
 
 "The clear streams join together in a delightful valley that opens 
 the hills and form a table as beautiful as could be imagined. A 
 fine grove of trees hangs over it, as if to adorn themselves, by seeing 
 their perfect image in the brilliant mirror. 
 
 "A thousand trees grow to the skies with odoriferous and fair 
 fruits, like the orange which has the hue that Daphne had in her 
 hair 
 
 And so on, in other stanzas, about the fruits. And 
 then; 
 
20 
 
 "The lovely and fine tapestry that covers the earth takes much 
 of their beauty off the Achemeuian ones, (the Persian), but renders 
 sweeter the shady valley. Here the Cephisian flower (the nar- 
 cissus) inclines its head over the serene and transparent pond, 
 and blossoms the son and grandson of Cinyra's (Adonis converted 
 into the anemone) for whom thou, Paphian goddess, still sighest." 
 
 And after some more stanzas describing the flowers 
 with those fine touches of legend, he brings forth the 
 
 Nymphs : 
 
 "It was amid all this freshness that the second Argonauts left 
 their ships for the woods where the beautiful goddesses allowed 
 themselves to remain, as if they knew nothing, some playing sweet 
 citharas, others harps or sonorous flutes, while others, with golden 
 bows, feigned to follow animals they did not follow." 
 
 And then the chase of the Goddesses by the Discov- 
 erers runs through more of twenty stanzas, the whole 
 Canto Ninth being really given to the Isle of Love. It 
 is a wonderful composition, of exquisite beauty in many 
 of its details, in unsurpassed grandeur in its whole. It 
 would be enough to characterize Camoens as the Poet 
 of Love, if he had written nothiag else. I must add, it 
 is as pure as a heavenly vision, the love in Poetry and 
 Eeligion being purified of all earthly corruption, the 
 Houris of the Mohammedan Paradise, the Valkyrs of 
 the Valhalla, the Nymphs of the Isle of Love being so 
 many allegories of glory, of hero-immortality. 
 
 Camoens would not, however, have been the com- 
 plete Poet of Love he was if the dying or dead Chivalry 
 had no part in his Poem. It has, in the episode of 
 twelve Portuguese knights, who went to England to 
 fight a tournament for twelve wronged English ladies 
 that had found no defenders among their own country- 
 men. 
 
 I hope I have justified my view that Camoens' great- 
 
21 
 
 est source of inspiration was love. He accustomed 
 himself to love, in love lie transformed everything, and, 
 when h^ ceased to care for women and absorbed him- 
 self in the national Poem, his experiences made him 
 give true life to every episode in which love played a 
 part; he understood love as the controlling force of 
 life as well as of Nature, the principal means of the 
 Ideal, the source of all creation, love, but not its spurious 
 homonyms, which he so strongly condemns in his Poem. 
 The teaching of the Ltjsiads could be resumed in the 
 lesson for men to defeat Death, quoting the verses of its 
 opening stanzas : 
 
 Aquelles que por obras valerosas 
 Se vao da lei da morte llbertando. 
 
 "Those who by noble deeds are freeing themselves from the 
 law of death. 
 
 Or, as Sir Eichard Fanshaw translated them into 
 Elisabethan English: 
 
 . . . and Those who by 
 Their deeds at home left not their names defac't. 
 
 The Poem is thus a school of immortality; not of 
 personal immortality only, of collective immortality, 
 such as that of the unknown Discoverers and Conquer- 
 ors, who surrounded Vasco da Gama, and of love aim- 
 ing at its highest mark, that which makes the im- 
 mortal ones. In everything he commends the high kind 
 of love, as "the low enfeebles the strong." 
 
 Que um baixo amor os fortes enfraquece. 
 
 Ill, 139. 
 
 Speaking of the selection of Vasco da Gama and of 
 his crew, he will say : 
 
22 
 
 "They were rewarded by Manuel, so that they armed themselves 
 with greater love, and were encouraged with high words for all 
 labors that might come. So were collected together the Minyas to 
 fight for the golden veil, in the fatidic galley, which dared, ad- 
 venturous, to tempt the first the Buxine sea." 
 
 Fatidic, because the ship Argo was made from trees 
 of the prophetic forest of Dodona. 
 
 "Assi foram os Minyas ajuntados 
 Para que o veo dourado combatessem, 
 Na fatidica nau, que ousou primeira 
 Tentar o mar Euxino, atentureira." 
 
 IV, 83. 
 
 Has this not the ring of the noblest human language, 
 that in which love, duty and religion are made one! 
 
 Gentlemen, I have finished my third call among 
 American' students as a Camonian pilgrim, and I can 
 assure you that I do not feel at all ashamed of begging 
 for his glory. When I see his great Poem so com- 
 pletely ignored as it is in foreign countries, I do not 
 grieve for him. What does it matter to Antares, or to 
 Sirius, if they are not seen in all their grandeur by all 
 men? A few telescopes turned on them suffice to their 
 glory in our little planet. But Camoens has a greater 
 solace than the admiration of the few. The Portuguese 
 language will always be called "the language of Cam- 
 oens," while no poet in the world has more the devo- 
 tion of his own people, nay, of all who speak his lan- 
 guage, than he. No foreigner that would read of the 
 national celebration of his third centenary, in 1880, 
 both in Portugal and Brazil, would doubt that. Those 
 were divine honors. Two nations could not have ren- 
 dered them to a poet three centuries after his death if 
 he had not left in the hearts and minds of all who speak 
 his language an inspiration, a cohesive and elevating 
 
23 
 
 impulse, which only true creators can kindle forever. 
 Homer has no readers compared with the writers of the 
 day, still we must not fear for him. 
 
 There is now about forty years that I follow the 
 march of literature, and its relative place in the world 
 seems to me to become each day smaller. This, we 
 must remember, is no longer the Age of writing; it is 
 already the Age of typewriting. The Manuscript is 
 dead. I doubt if the affinities of inspiration with the 
 machine will ever be the same as with the pen. Allow 
 me to express to you my whole faith. I do not believe 
 that there is anywhere through heavens a register for 
 money deals, however great ; but I believe there is one 
 for intellectual creations, and that the work of Homer, 
 Dante, Camoens, Shakespere, and their like, tran- 
 scends the Earth. 
 
%,.'^^/^.,^'^^/'f