However this may be, the first name officially given to Brazil was The Land of the True (or Holy) Cross; only later did the name Brazil, said to have been bestowed by King Emanuel of Portugal, replace the pious title. There is something symbolic in the change; brazil[2] is the name of the reddish dyewood which became so important commercially that it caused naval combats and Portuguese-French rivalry, leading to the effective occupation of the land by the Portuguese. The beam of the cross yielded to a humbler wood as the national designation, just as the pious pretensions of the early colonizers quickly vanished before their impious greed. The early reports of the newly discovered land lived up to the paradisical visions that had partly inspired the quest. Truly here was a land of promise, a terrestrial paradise that made men dip their pens in milk and honey when they wrote of its wonders. Vaz de Caminha, in what has been called the nation’s “baptismal certificate,” grew rhapsodical in vain; Vespucci,--he for whom the American continent was named,--actually termed it an earthly paradise, but the Portuguese were slow to value the new possession; the cross was not a cross of gold. Nobrega, in 1549, exaggerated the extent of the new discovery even as others were to exaggerate the variety and magic of its fauna and flora; he considered that it occupied no less than two-thirds of the world’s area. Padre Anchieta, the noble leader of the Jesuits, repeated (1585) Vespucci’s glorification and thought the new land not inferior to Portugal, and thus ran the litany of adoration from the topographical pen of Gabriel Soares to the chronicler Cardim, to the pompous Rocha Pitta, and--now with realistic modifications aplenty--down to our own day, when Graça Aranha, by the very title of his novel _Chanaan_, reveals his conception of his native country as the Land of Promise. From the very beginning the new discovery had captivated the imaginations of the Europeans; to this day its chief quality is the imagination which Senhor Aranha, in a speech at the Sorbonne (1913) has distinguished from the imagination of other peoples. “In Brazil,” he explained, “the collective trait is the imagination. It is not the faculty of idealization, nor the creation of life through esthetic expression, nor the predominance of thought; it is rather the illusion that comes from the representation of the universe, the state of magic, in which reality is dissipated and is transformed into an image.… The distant roots of this imagination may be found in the souls of the various races that met amidst the lavishness of tropical nature. Each people brought to the fusion its own melancholy. Each, having arrived with a spirit full of the terror of several gods, with the anguish of memories of a past forever lost, was possessed by the indefinable uneasiness of the foreign land. Thus was developed that implacable sensibility which magnifies and distorts things, which alternately