The reaction against Romanticism, if varied in France, was even less disciplined in Ibero-America. And here we come upon a curious fact in comparative literature that is deserving of investigation. In the first place, Parnassianism in Brazil (and in Spanish America, for that matter) was hardly ever the frigidly perfect thing it became in the hands of the Frenchman. A certain tropical warmth is bound, in the new-world poets, to glow in the marble veins of their sonnets. In the second,--and this is truly peculiar,--that Symbolism (especially in its Decadent phase) which was responsible for a fundamental renovation of letters in Spanish America and later affected Spain itself, passed over Brazil with but scant influence. Brazil produced some highly interesting Parnassians (with proper reservations made in the use of that term); Bilac, in his realm, is the peer of any Spanish American. But the Portuguese-speaking republic shows no figure approaching the epochal Rubén Darío, whose life and labours fairly sum up the modernist era in Spanish America.[1] II The scientific spirit in Brazilian poetry was of short duration, even though Romero, one of its chief exponents, gives himself credit for having initiated in 1870 the reaction against Romanticism with a poetry that sought harmony with the realistic philosophy of the day. He and Martins Junior (whom Carvalho places at the head of the “scientific” poets) are today considered to have troubled the waters of Brazilian lyrism for but a passing moment. In reality, they but hastened the advent of Parnassianism. Brazil for a while was weary of the great Latin weakness,--eloquence. Its poetical condors had too long orated from mountain-tops; it was high time for swans, for towers of ivory. Besides, I believe, this answered a certain need of the national psyche. The sensualist, too, has his moments of refinement, and he becomes the exquisite voluptuary. Science in poetry, as exemplified by the strophes of Martins Junior, is too often but rhymed harangue, even as the early Brazilian versifiers presented us with rhymed fruit-baskets, aviaries and geographies. Note the unscientific worship of science in his lines,--that science which so prosaically he terms “o grande agente altruista,” the great altruistic agent: O seculo immortal, ó seculo em que a conquista, A guerra, as religiões e as velhas monarchias Tem tombado no chão, nojentas como harpias, Tristes como o deserto! Eu curvo-me ante ti E ponho o joelho em terra afim de orar Ao teu busto ideal, titanico, estrellado!…[2]