The “romanticism” of the _Uruguay_ is worth dwelling upon, if only to help reveal our long-tolerated terminological inadequacy.[3] It begins, not with the regular invocation, but with a quasi-Horatian plunge _in medias res_. It does not employ the outworn octave, but sonorous blank verse. The freedom of its style and the harmony of its verse “announce Garrett, Gonçalves Dias[4] and the future admirable modellers of blank verse, in the distribution of the episodes and the novelty of language and simile.” The language is not the Gongoristic extravagance of the Academicians; it is modern, even contemporary, grandiloquent in the Spanish style. The “Indianism” of the poem, in which Basilio da Gama forecasts the later Indianism of the Romantics, is not to be confused with that later type; for it must be recalled that Basilio da Gama did not look upon his Indians with that sentimental veneration characteristic of the nineteenth century Brazilians. As they were secondary to his purpose, so were they in his conception. “Two and distinct are the features of this aspect of our literature. The first Indianism, initiated by Basilio da Gama, continued by Durão and almost limited to the two epics, is hardly more than a poetic artifice; the Indian enters as a necessity of the subject, a simple esthetic or rhetorical means. He is not sung, but is rather an element of the song. In the second Indianism, that of the Romantics,--the loftiest representative of which is Gonçalves Dias,--the Indian advances from the position of an accessory to that of an essential element; he is the subject and the object of the poem. In this first phase of Indianism the sympathy of the poet is transferred only incidentally to the savage.… The contrary case obtains in the second phase; the sympathy of the poet is his entirely. So that, in the main, it is the attitude of the poet that distinguished the two Indianisms: indifferent in the first, sympathetic in the second.” And since choices must be made, Verissimo is right when he finds the earlier poets nearer to the sociological truth in preferring Portuguese civilization, with all its defects, to the imaginary charms of indigenous life. Yet sociological error of the Romantic Indianists proved more than poetic truth, for it was fecund “not only for literature, but even for the development of the national sentiment.” … “_O Uruguay_ possesses in Portuguese literature the value of being the first poem of a freer, newer, more spontaneous character after the series of epics derived from _Os Lusiadas_, and in Brazilian literature that of being the initiator of the movement which, whatever its aberrations, contributed the most to the independence of our letters.…”