He was not religious (remember that I am treating him as he treated his own subjects--as he is revealed in his writings); he was not intensely emotional; he looked love and death straight in the eyes, as much with curiosity as with any inner or outer trembling before either. He was, in his realm, what Machado de Assis was in his,--a spirit of the Limbo, shall we say? His motto, if he would have accepted the static connotation of mottoes, might have been Horace’s _medio tutissimus ibis_, only that he sought the middle path not so much through desire of safety as out of a certain philosophical conviction. But there again I use a word that does not harmonize with Verissimo’s intellectual elasticity, for words are almost as hard and cold as the type that prints them, while thoughts rather resemble the air that takes them into space. And Verissimo is especially sensible to this permanence-in-transiency. “As to permanence,” he wrote in an interesting essay on _Que é Literatura_[1] (What is Literature?), “it might be said, in a sort of paradox, that it is precisely the transitoriness of the emotion that makes a book of lasting interest. It is an essential difference between knowledge and emotion that the first is lasting and the second transitory. A fact learned remains, is added to the sum of our knowledge. We may forget it, but such forgetting is not in the nature of things necessary, and the truths that are contained in a book of science that we have read join our permanent intellectual acquisitions. The emotions are by very nature fleeting,--they are not, like the facts we learn, added to and incorporated into one another; they are a series of experiences that change constantly. Within a few hours the emotion aroused by the reading of a poem is extinguished; it cannot endure. It may be renewed, by the re-reading of the poem or by resorting to memory, and, if it be a masterpiece, successive readings and recollection will not blunt its power to move us.”