Her didactic works, _Livro da Infancia_, published in 1899, consisting of prose and verse, and _Alma Infantil_, written in collaboration with Julio Cesar da Silva, 1912, for school use, do not belong to her major productions. It is significant of the status of the Brazilian text-book, as well as of the varied tasks thrown upon the shoulders of the educated in a continent where the major portion of the population has been thus far condemned to illiteracy, when we see how frequently even the major creative spirits of the country turn to the writing of text-books. Yesterday Olavo Bilac, fellow Parnassian of Francisca Julia, spared time for the labour; today Coelho Netto, Oliveira Lima, Monteiro Lobato do so. Again and again is one reminded what a sacrifice, what a luxury, is the creative life in a land that lacks anything like the creative audience. And how much better off are we, who are only on the threshold of a truly national literature? * * * * * It is not impossible that the fame of Francisca Julia da Silva will grow with the coming years. She will be recognized not only as a gifted woman who was one of the few to carry on, worthily, the difficult perfection of Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Theophile Gautier and their fellows, but as the equal, when at her best, of Brazil’s foremost Parnassians. There are not many sonnets in the poetry of Olavo Bilac, who so generously received her, to match the sheer artistry of her _Dance of the Centaurs_, her _Argonauts_, her _Impassive Muse_. Indeed, compare the _Impassive Muse_ with Bilac’s over-ardent _Profissão de Fe_ (Profession of Faith) and see whether the woman has not in the very words and images and tonality of the piece exhibited the inner and outer example of that Parnassianism which Bilac here expresses in words rather than attains in spirit. Bilac, as we have seen, was too passionate a nature not to warm all his statues to life; in Francisca, as João Ribeiro said in his preface to _Marmores_, we find “ecstasy rather than passion,”--a cold ecstasy, one might add, like the upper regions of the atmosphere, which, though flooded with the sunlight, are little warmed by its passage through them.