“A variety, however, may be very interesting; it may even be, in certain respects, more interesting than the principal type, acquiring in time and space qualities that raise it above the type. Brazilian literature, or at least poetry, was already in the XVIIth century superior to Portuguese. It is by no means patriotic presumption, which I lack completely, to judge that, with the development of Brazil, its probable politic and economic greatness in the future will give to the literary expression of its life supremacy over Portugal, whose historic rôle seems over and which, from all appearances, will disappear in an Iberic union. If this country of ours does not come apart and split up into several others, each a ‘patria’ with a dialect of its own, we shall prove true to the prophecies of Camões and Fr. Luiz de Souza, becoming the legitimate heirs of Portugal’s language and literature. If such a thing should happen, it would give us an enormous moral superiority to the United States and the Spanish-American nations, making of us the only nation in America with a truly national language and literature. “But this literature of ours, which, as a branch of the Portuguese already has existed for four centuries, possesses neither perfect continuity, cohesion, nor the unity of the great literatures,--of the Portuguese, for example. The principal reason, to explain the phenomenon in a single word, is that it depended ever, in its earliest periods, rather upon Portugal and later upon Europe, France especially, than upon Brazil itself. It always lacked the principle of solidarity, which would seem to reveal lack of national sentiment. It always has lacked communicability,--that is, its writers, who were separated by vast distances and extreme difficulty of communication, remained strangers one to the other. And I refer not to personal communication, which is of secondary importance, but to intellectual communication that is established through books. The various influences that can be noted in all our important literary movements are all external. What is called improperly the Mineira School of the XVIIIth century, and the Maranhão pléiade of the middle of this (the XIXth) received their inspiration from Portugal, but did not transmit it. As is said in military tactics, contact was never established between the writers or between their intellects.