ABSTRACT
The devotion as well as the curiosity of our friend was highly gratified by a sight of this noble monument of piety, in which we passed three hours; and though, from the religion I professed, my enthusiasm was less warm, I contemplated with reverence its effect on the holy men by whom we were surrounded; who seemed already to be divested of all sublunary attachments, and to be elevated above either the pleasures or pains of this world. I could not help considering them as the inhabitants of another; yet there were among them some faces, in which a skilful physiognomist might perhaps have discovered more of regret than of resignation. Isabella and I waited at the foot of a rock, near the church, while Villanova confessed to one of the monks, and went through other ceremonies of his religion at which we were not admitted to be present; – he then came to us, and we proceeded to the hermitages above. I carried Thicknesse’s book in my hand, and found that he had not much magnified the difficulties of the ascent, or the wondrous prospects which every point where we rested afforded us. One of the hermitages we found empty; the pious inhabitant was attending on a sick brother. We did not however venture to sit down in it, but took possession of a bench not far from his door, cut in the rock, the rude masses of which, on each side of us, were mantled with aromatic shrubs. The myrtle arose spontaneously in the clefts, and the balm of Gilead mingled its vivid green with the paler lavender and the mournful rosemary. – The Spanish broom, the jessamine, and the tree germander formed bowers above us; and the vine crept among the inferior parasitical plants, and its broad and graceful foliage was spangled by the light flowers of various sorts of clematis. – The Portuguese have not in general much idea of enjoying the beauties of nature – but Villanova seemed to feel in these scenes delight equal to ours: yet the image of Xaviera was even here before him; and when I expatiated, with all the enthusiasm I felt, on the Paradise around us, he owned, that to him it would be a desert, all lovely as it was, if he were compelled to live like one of these solitary, insulated beings; but with Xaviera! – these rocks, adorned by the hands of nature with wild flowers; these precipices, whence the unaccustomed eye recoils with terror; even the pointed summits, so much exposed as to afford nourishment 71only to the holly and the juniper, and in some places hardly to the moss and lichen; all would to him be a terrestrial heaven with her!
