Some such reasoning as this explains the domesticity of the women poets. It explains, too, I believe, why Francisca Julia, for whom a number of Brazilian critics would claim a respectable place with the men of her nation, embraced the Parnassian cult during the few years that were vouchsafed her. She was, if her poems tell anything, an ardent spirit; her passions were too great for the routine of civic and domestic verse; she would do something more than merely transfer her “kitchen, church and children” into homiletic poems. Lacking either the courage or the temperament of an Alfonsina Storni, she could express herself through an apparently cold and formal imagery. Her early impassivity may have been the defence reaction of a highly sensitive compassionate nature. Throughout her work she is, if we must use terms, more “Parnassian” than a number of avowed men of that cult, which had reached its crest in Brazil at the time Francisca Julia was emerging from adolescence. She was little more than twenty when her first collection, _Marmores_, appeared in 1895, and it is common knowledge that she had been writing then for some six years for such organs as the _Estado de São Paulo_ (one of the most important, and the oldest, of Brazilian newspapers), the _Correio Paulistano_, the _Diario Popular_, the _Semana_. Between _Marmores_ and the next book, _Esphinges_, intervened some eight years. Late in 1920 she died, and perhaps the crown of her recognition--for her ability had been recognized with the publication of her first book--was the phrase from the speech by Umberto de Campos in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, on November 4th, several days after her burial. “If the Academy of Letters, upon its establishment, had permitted the entrance of women into its body,” declared the youngest of its members, “it would in this hour be mourning a vacant chair.”[3]