“The country immediately adjoining Buenos Ayres, the
hill on which we live, is very unpleasant; bare, burnt hills, bearing nothing
but windmills. The Valley of Alcantara, over which the great aqueduct passes,
is indeed very striking; it winds among these hills, and perhaps owes much of
its beauty to the contrast, like the villages in the South Downs, and that
beautiful valley on the left of the road from Salisbury to Deptford. In rich
countries they would not be noticed, but here they are like water in the
deserts. The whole road to Cintra is thus ugly and uninteresting. The road
paved all the way—a very Devil’s bowling-alley—you can
imagine no scenery more wearying; but eastward of Lisbon it is totally
different; there all is rich and beautiful—exquisitely beautiful, now
that the green corn and the vineyards give it all the fresh verdure of an
English landscape. Yesterday evening I took a long ride there with my uncle
about the Valley of Chellas, the gardens of which delightful spot chiefly
supply Lisbon. The place is intersected by a thousand bye-lanes, unenterable by
carriage, and as intricate as one of the last propositions in Euclid, all angles and
| 78 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 26. |
“The country looks covered with wood; not, indeed, of
forest size, but large enough for beauty, and all useful. The fences are either
walls,—and the walls are soon covered with luxuriant vegetation in this
country,—or aloe-guarded banks; and the aloe is magnificent: the stem of
the blossom looks almost like a piece of timber: and the fennel grows finely as
a weed; you know its handsome leaf, fine as vegetable threads, or like hair
fine and curled, its blossom growing tall, a fine yellow flower,
distinguishable at a considerable distance from its size: and the acanthus, the
plant that gave a man of genius the idea of the Corinthian capital, which he in
consequence invented:—blend these with wild roses and woodbines, more
profusely beautiful than I ever saw them elsewhere, and you have the idea of
these bank-
| Ætat. 26. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 79 |
“The warm weather is come; we shut our windows to exclude the heated air, and our shutters to darken the room: if half the money expended upon the souls in purgatory were employed in watering the street, we should be relieved from the torment of burning. Yet is the heat more endurable than the intense light; this is insufferably painful: the houses are white, the stones in the street white, the very dust bleached, and all reflect back upon us the scorching sun: the light is like the quivering of a furnace fire; it dazzles and makes the eyes ache, and blindness is very common. At evening the sea breeze rises, a sudden change! tremendous for an invalid, but it purifies the town, and then, owl-like, we come out of our nests. At Cintra we shall be cool; we wait only for the processions of the Body of God, and St. Anthony, the 12th and 13th of June, and the Heart of Jesus on the 28th, and the first bull-fight, which will be about that time.
“The butchers annually pay a certain sum to
| 80 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 26. |
“The mules and goats have a most ugly cup-shaped bell,
from six to twelve inches long, hanging from their neck, with a clapper as rude
as the rude cup in which it clinks. Manuel is at war with
my uncle’s mule, and, like worse people than himself, adopts the system
of coercion, when conciliation has been advised, and the effects of force
experienced. ‘You should coax the mule,’ said my uncle,
‘and never go near her without carrying her something in your
hand.’ ‘No, senhor,’ said
Mambrino, ‘that is the way with horned
cattle, I know, but not with beasts like mules and
| Ætat. 26. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 81 |
“Your letter has just reached me; a welcome visitant.
Here a letter is of ten-fold more value than in England: our friends are,
perhaps, like our daily comforts,—their value hardly understood till we
are deprived of them. I go on comfortably. The weather makes me lazy, and yet I
have read enormously, and digested much. Laziness is the influenza of the
country. The stone-cutter will lay his head upon the stone at which he has
worked, and deep, though it be hot enough to broil a beaf-steak. The very dogs
are lazy: it was but yesterday I saw a great son of a bitch (literally) let a
mule step upon him, from sheer laziness; and then he rose, howling, and walked
away. The fellows lie sleeping every where in the streets; they seem to possess
the power of sleeping when they will. Everlasting noise is another
characteristic of Lisbon. Their noonday fireworks, their cannonading on every
fool’s pretext, their bells to every goat in a flock and every mule in a
drove, prove this; above all, their everlasting bell-ding-donging,—for
bell-ringing would convey the English idea of music, and here it is only noise.
A merchant, not far from my uncle’s, has a private chapel, from whence
his bells annoy the whole neighbourhood. The English Hotel, till lately, was
near
| 82 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 26. |
“We often heard a noise below which puzzled us; it was like damping linen, but so often, that all the linen in Lisbon could not have supplied the sound. At last, when Maria was cleaning the adjoining room, we heard it; she was laying the dust, and in the same way as she damps the clothes in ironing,—by taking a great mouthful of water and then spirting it out: this is the Portuguese way, and the mouth makes a very good watering-pot.
“I have heard a good anecdote to illustrate the personal insecurity in this kingdom. Did you ever see old H——? He was a Porto merchant, and had a quarrel with a Portuguese, in consequence of which he and his antagonist always went out with guns, each watching for the first shot; but the Portuguese used to attack his house at night, and fire through the windows at him, till Mrs. H——, who did not like this chance-shooting, prevailed on her husband to quit the kingdom. The gallows here has a stationary ladder; and God knows, if the hangman did all that was necessary, he would have a hard place.
“My uncle has purchased charts of all the coasts and
ports of Spain and its islands, with the intention of giving them to you.
Should you ever get on this
| Ætat. 26. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 83 |
“God bless you! Edith’s love.
