where they are, but they are soon satisfied with the pleasing reality without concerning themselves about the nature of the miracle which has transported them to a terrestrial heaven.[164] When the festival is drawing to a close, the poet for the first time explains the object of the fiction, by stating it to be an allegorical representation of the happiness which is the reward of courage and virtue. After this cold manner of dissolving the enchantment, the unprejudiced reader feels little interest in the conclusion of the poem. The stanzas in which the prophetic nymph celebrates the future atchievements of the Portuguese are historical fragments, the connection of which must be studied in order to form a just estimate of their poetic merits and demerits. The geographic supplement which is put into the mouth of Thetis is still colder, notwithstanding the singular idea of the globe which hovers in the air, and which exalts the miracle of the geographic lecture. But thus is the sympathy of the reader the more powerfully excited by the passage towards the end of the Lusiad, where Camoens speaks of himself; which he had refrained from doing in the preceding part of the work. As he approached the close of his labour he was impressed with the conviction that no earthly happiness awaited him; and now saw “his years descending, and the transition from summer to autumn near at hand; his genius frozen by the coldness of fate, and he himself borne down by sorrow into the stream of black oblivion and eternal sleep.”[165] His heart then pours fourth the epiphonema of the poem, consisting of a didactic apostrophe to his sovereign, full of loyalty, but not less abounding in honest zeal for truth, justice and virtue.