The poets of France and of Lusitania have placed elegiac scenes on the shores of Melinda and the neighbouring isles. It is a far cry from those fictitious sorrows to the real torments of Napoleon under the stars foretold by the singer of Beatrice and in those seas of Eleonora and Virginia. Did the great men of Rome, banished to the isles of Greece, concern themselves with the charms of those shores and the divinities of Crete and Naxos? That which enraptured Vasco de Gama and Camoëns could not move Bonaparte: prone on the poop of the vessel, he did not perceive that above his head glittered unknown constellations whose rays met his eyes for the first time. What cared he for those stars which he had never seen from his bivouacs, which had not shone upon his empire? And yet no star was wanting to his destiny: one half of the firmament lighted up his cradle; the other was reserved for the pomp of his tomb. The sea which Napoleon was crossing was not the friendly sea which carried him from the harbours of Corsica, from the sands of Abukir, from the rocks of Elba, to the shores of Provence; it was that hostile ocean which, after enclosing him in Germany, France, Portugal and Spain, opened out before his course only to close up again behind him. Probably, when he saw the waves urge on his ship, the trade-winds drive it ever further with a constant blast, he did not make the reflections upon his catastrophe with which it inspires me: each man feels his life in his own manner; he who affords a great spectacle to the world is less touched and less instructed than the spectator. Occupied with the past as though it could be reborn, hoping still in his memories, Bonaparte scarce perceived that he was crossing the line, nor asked what hand traced the circles in which the globes are compelled to imprison their eternal progress. On the 15th of August, the wandering colony kept St. Napoleon's Day[392] on board the vessel which was taking Napoleon to his last halting-place. On the 15th of October, the _Northumberland_ was abreast of St. Helena. The passenger mounted on deck: he had a difficulty in discovering an imperceptible black speck in the bluish immensity; he took a spy-glass: he surveyed that particle of earth as he might formerly have surveyed a fortress in the middle of a lake. He saw the market-town of St. James enchased in scarped rocks; not a wrinkle in that barren face but a gun hung from it: they seemed to wish to receive the captive according to his genius. [Sidenote: Arrival at St. Helena.] On the 16th of October 1815, Bonaparte touched the rock, his mausoleum, even as, on the 12th of October 1492, Christopher Columbus touched the New World, his monument: "There," says Walter Scott, "at the entrance to the Indian Ocean, Bonaparte was deprived of the means of making a second _avatar_ or incarnation on earth."