“Lo, Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes In variegated maze of mount and glen. Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide or pen To follow half on which the eye dilates, Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken Than those whereof such things the bard relates Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates— The horrid crags by toppling convent crown’d, The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep, The mountain moss by scorching skies embrown’d, The sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep, The tender azure of the unruffled deep, The orange tints that gild the greenest bough, The torrents that from cliff to valley leap, The vine on high, the willow branch below, Mixed in one mighty scene with varied beauty glow.” The poet, in one of his letters to his mother complaining of the dirt and discomfort of Lisbon, says: “To make amends for the filthiness of Lisbon and its still filthier inhabitants, the village of Cintra, about fifteen miles from the capital, is perhaps in every respect the most delightful in Europe. It contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial; palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts, and precipices; convents on stupendous heights; a distant view of the sea and the Tagus.... It unites in itself all the wildness of the Western Highlands with the verdure of the south of France.” Robert Southey, too, calls Cintra “the most blessed spot in the habitable globe,” and Beckford’s letters are crowded with eloquent passages to the same effect. “The scenery,” he says, “is truly Elysian, and exactly such as poets assign for the resort of happy spirits.... The mossy fragments of rock, grotesque pollards and rustic bridges you meet with at every step, recall Savoy and Switzerland to the imagination; but the exotic cast of the vegetation, the vivid green of the citron, the golden fruitage of the orange, the blossoming myrtle, and the rich fragrance of the turf, embroidered with the brightest coloured and most aromatic flowers, allow me, without a violent stretch of fancy, to believe myself in the garden of the Hesperides.” The Portuguese poets have of course dwelt much upon the beauties of Cintra, especially Almeida Garrett, the principal Portuguese poet of modern times. One stanza by him is cut upon a slab erected on one of his favourite walks in the village as a memorial, and the following lines from it may be quoted:— “Cintra, amena estancia, Throno da vegetante primavera: Quem te não ama, quem em teu regaço Uma hora da vida lhe ha corrido, Essa hora esquecerá?”