Alvares de Azevedo is the standard-bearer of the Brazilian Byronists, but he should not be classed offhand as a mere echoer of the Englishman’s strophes. His _Lira dos Veinte Annos_ is exactly what the title announces; the lyre of a twenty-year-old, which, though its strings give forth romantic strains of bitterness and melancholy and imagination that have become associated with Byron, Musset and Leopardi, sounds an individual note as well. The poet died in his twenty-first year; it was a death that he foresaw and that naturally coloured his verses. “Eat, drink and love; what can the rest avail us?” was the epigraph he took from Byron for his _Vagabundo_. His brief, hectic career had no time for meticulous polishing of lines; if the statue did not come out as at first he desired, he broke it rather than recast the metal. Not a little of his proclamative rhyming is the swagger of his youth, which is capable, at times, of giving to a poem so banal a quadruplicative title as “’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she! ’Tis she!” With the frustrated ambitions of weakness he longed for illimitable power. In the _12 de Setembro_ (his birthday) he exclaims: Fôra bello talvez sentir no craneo A alma de Goethe, e reunir na fibra Byron, Homero e Dante; Sonhar-se n’um delirio momentaneo A alma da creação, e som que vibra A terra palpitante.[7] Like the hero of _Aucassin et Nicolette_, he prefers hell to heaven for a dwelling-place. No inferno estão suavissimas bellezas, Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras; La se namora em boa companhia, Não pode haver inferno com Senhoras![8] he declares in _O Poeta Moribundo_. He is Brazil’s sick child par excellence, ill, like so many after him, with the malady of the century. But one must guard against attributing this to the morbid pose that comes so easy at twenty. Pose there was, and flaunting satanism, but too many of these poets in Brazil, and in the various republics of Spanish-America died young for one to doubt their sincerity altogether. The mood is a common one to youth; in an age that, like the romantic, made a literary fashion of their weakness, they were bound to appear as they appeared once again when Symbolism and the Decadents vanquished for a time the cold formalism of the Parnassian school. That Alvares de Azevedo, for all his millennial doubts and despairs was a child, is attested by the following pedestrian quatrain from the poem of the quadruplicative title: Mas se Werther morreu por ver Carlotta Dando pão com manteiga as criancinhas, Se achou-a assim mais bella,--eu mais te adoro Sonhando-te a lavar as camisinhas![9]