“Oliveira Lima never wrote verses,” declared Salvador de Mendonça once in a speech of welcome. “I believe that, with the exception of the _Lusiads_, all poems are to him like the _Colombo_ of Porto Alegre to the readers of our literature, an unknown land awaiting some Columbus to discover it. Like an old philosopher friend of mine, who doesn’t admit monologues or asides in the theatre because only fools or persons threatened with madness converse with themselves, so Oliveira Lima finds it hardly natural for people to write in verse, for the language of seers was never the spoken tongue. His spirit is positive and direct; only curved lines are lacking for him to be a geometer. His characteristic trait is sincerity; he says only what he thinks is true, and says it without beating about the bush, in the explicit form of his conviction. I believe that he is but a lukewarm admirer of music, and prefers, to the contemplation of nature, the study of social phenomena and the examination of the human beehive.” For a Brazilian never to have written verses is indeed almost a violation of the social code, and it may be that Senhor Lima’s lukewarmness toward music helps to explain a certain lack of musicality in his clear but compact prose. But lack of poetic appreciation should not be inferred from his friend’s lines; one has but to go through one of Lima’s earliest and most solid works, _Aspectos da Litteratura Colonial Brazileira_, to discover, in this original contribution, a deep, unostentatious feeling for those beautiful emotions we call poetry. His literary career, as we have seen, is closely identified with his numerous peregrinations. It opened with a historical study of his birthplace: _Pernambuco, seu Desenvolimento historica_ (1894), followed two years later by the _Aspectos_. Thereafter is pursued, rather closely, the travels of Lima, resulting in _Nos Estados Unidos_ (1899), a work of uneven value upon the United States, _No Japão_, (1903), a more mature volume upon the land of the rising sun, countless speeches and series of lectures delivered in the universities of both hemispheres--now at the Sorbonne, now at the University of Louvaine, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford University and lesser institutions--and always upon his favourite theme: the history of Brazilian and Latin-American culture. Out of these lectures have arisen more than one of his books, some of them originally delivered in English and French; for Lima is an accomplished linguist, employing English and French with ease and speaking German, Italian and Spanish as well.