In 1832, when Magalhães published his first collection, _Poesias_, he was a conventional worshipper of the Portuguese classics. A visit to Europe in 1833 converted him thoroughly to French Romanticism and when, three years later, he issued the _Suspiros poeticos e Saudades_ (Poetic Sighs and Longings), the very title proclaimed the advent of a new orientation. His invocation to the angel of poesy is in itself a miniature declaration of poetic independence: Ja nova Musa meu canto inspira; não mais empunho profana lyra. Minha alma, imita a natureza; quem vencer pode sua belleza? De dia, de noite Louva o Senhor; Canta os prodigios Do Creador.[2] The chaste virgins of Greece, as he announces in the lines preceding this virtual, if distinctly minor _ars poetica_, have fascinated his childhood enough. Farewell Homer; the poet will dream now of his native land and sigh, amid the cypress, a song made of his own griefs and longings. Nature, fatherland and God guiding humanity are the trinity of his emblem. They are his constant thought at home and abroad. “Nothing for me,” he exclaims in his _Deos e o Homem_, written in the Alps in 1834, “for my fatherland all.” In these _Suspiros_ form becomes fairly free, rhythm alters with change in the thought; it is difficult to point to anything in them that has not already appeared in Brazilian poetry from the earliest days, but the same outward elements of religion, patriotism and subjectivity have been fused into a more personal, more appealing product. _Os Mysterios_, a funereal canticle in memory of his children, published in Paris in 1858, is in eight cantos that sing the triumph of faith. As he wrote in his philosophical work issued in this same year, _Factos de Espiritu Humano_: “This world would be a horrible comedy, a causeless illusion, and human existence a jest perpetrated by nothingness,--all would be but a lie, if there were not a just and kind God!… That which is absurd cannot be true. God exists and the human spirit is immortal in that knowledge.” There is the kernel of his poetry. _Urania_, Vienna 1862, chants love through the symbol of his wife. The epic attempt, _A Confederação dos Tamoyos_, in ten cantos, is noteworthy not so much for lofty flights as for its evidence of the author’s blending of the patriotic and the religious motives. The attitude toward the Jesuit missionaries is the opposite to the stand taken by Basilio da Gama in the _Uruguay_; they alone among the Portuguese are worthy; the Indians yield at last to civilization, but they are idealized into defenders of justice against the Portuguese exploiters.