Mais que as armas, porém, mais que a batalha, Mais que os incendios, brilha o amor que ateia O odio e entre os povos a discordia espalha: Esse amor que ora activa, ora asserena A guerra, e o heroico Paris encadeia Aos curvos seios da formosa Helena.[3] In _Delenda Carthago_ there is the clash of rutilant arms and the sense of war’s and glory’s vanity; this is the typical motif of the voluptuary, whether of love or of battle. It is not, however, the sorrowful conclusion of the philosopher facing the inevitable,--“the path of glory leads but to the grave.” Rather is it the weariness of the prodded senses. Scipio, victorious, grows mute and sad, and the tears run down his cheeks. For, beholding in rapid descent, Rolling into the abyss of oblivion and annihilation, Men and traditions, reverses and victories, Battles and trophies, six centuries of glory In a fistful of ashes,--the general foresaw That Rome, the powerful, the unvanquished, so strong in arms, Would go perforce the selfsame way as Carthage.… Nearby, the vague and noisy crackling Of the conflagration, that still roared furiously on, Rose like the sound of convulsive weeping. It is perhaps in _Via Lactea_ that the book--and Bilac’s art--reaches its apex. This is a veritable miniature milky way of sonnet gems; all claims to objectivity and impersonality have been forgotten in the man’s restrained, but by no means repressed passion. His love is not the ivory-tower vapouring of the youthful would-be Maeterlinckian that infests verse in Spanish and Portuguese America; it is of the earth, earthy. When he writes of his love he mingles with the idea the thought of country, and when he writes of his country it is often in terms of carnal passion. Verissimo has noted the same phenomenon in some of the poets that preceded Bilac and, of course, it is to be verified repeatedly in the singers of every land; indeed, is not Liberty always a woman, as our national coinage proves for the millionth time, and when soldiers are urged to fight and die _pro patria_, is it not a beautiful lady that hovers over the fields and trenches? In these sonnets he becomes the poet-chiseller of Hugo’s distich; into a form that would seem to have lost all adaptability to new manipulation he manages to pour something new, something his own. There is, in his very attitude, a preoccupation with form for its own sake that enables him to employ the sonnet without loss of effect. His devotion to the cameo-like structure is not absolute, however. In none of these poems does one feel that he has cramped his feelings in order to mortise quatrain into tercet. When, as in _A Alvorada de Amor_, he feels the need of greater room, he takes it. He is the lover weeping over gladness: