Thus _A Christã Nova_ (The Converted Jewess) contains few ideas; neither colour nor passion, vision nor fire, inhere in it. There is a sentimental fondness for the vanquished races--a note so common in the “Indian” age of Brazilian letters, and in analogous writings of the Spanish-Americans, as to have become a convention. The poem tells the story of a converted Jewess who is betrothed to a soldier. She is met by her betrothed after the war, with her father in the toils of the Inquisition. Rather than remain with her lover, she chooses to die with her parent; father and daughter go to their end together. Chiefly dry narrative, and perhaps better than _Potyra_, though that is negative praise. The poem is commendable for but two poetic cases: one, a very successful _terza rima_ version of the song of exile in the Bible, “By the waters of Babylon sat we down and wept …” and the other, a simple simile: … o pensamento E como as aves passageiras: voa A buscar melhor clima.… … Thought Is like a bird of passage, ever winging In quest of fairer climes.… It is in the _Occidentaes_ of 1900 that we find more of the real Machado de Assis than in the series that preceded it. The ripened man now speaks from a pulsing heart. Not that any of these verses leap into flame, as in the sonorous, incendiary strophes of Bilac, but at least the thoughts live in the words that body them forth and technical skill revels in its power. Here the essence of his attitude toward life appears--that life which, rather than death, is the corroding force, the universal and ubiquitous element. The _Mosca Azul_ is almost an epitome of his outlook, revealing as it does his tender irony, his human pity, his repressed sensuality, his feeling for form, his disillusioned comprehension of illusions. His resigned acceptance of life’s decline is characteristic of the man--part, perhaps, of his balanced outlook. One misses in him the rebel--the note that lends greatness to the hero in his foreordained defeat, raising the drama of surrender to the tragedy of the unconquered victim. But this would be asking him to be some one else--an inartistic request which we must withhold. I give the _Mosca Azul_ entire, because of its central importance to the poetry of the man, as well as to that more discerning outlook upon life which is to be found in his prose works. Era uma mosca azul, azas de ouro e granada, Filha da China ou da Indostão, Que entre as folhas brotou de uma rosa encarnada Em certa noite de verão. E zumbia e voava, e voava, e zumbia, Refulgindo ao clarão do sol E da lua,--melhor do que refulgia Um brilhante do Grão-Mogol. Um poléa que a viu, espantado e tristonho, Um poléa lhe perguntou: “Mosca, esse refulgir, que mais parece um sonho, Dize, quem foi que t’o ensinou?”