J’aime!--voilà le mot que la nature entière Crie au vent qui l’emporte, à l’oiseau qui le suit! Sombre et dernier soupir que poussera la terre Quand elle tombera dans l’eternelle nuit! Bilac’s passion at its height may replace the Creator of life himself; thus, in _A Alvorada do Amor_, Adam, before his Eve, cries ecstatically his triumph, despite their lost paradise. He blesses the moment in which she revealed her sin and life with her crime, “For, freed of God, redeemed and sublime, I remain a man upon earth, in the light of thine eyes. Earth, better than Heaven; Man, greater than God!” All, or almost all, of Bilac, is in this poem, which is thus one of his pivotal creations. De Carvalho has termed him a poet of “pansexualism”; the name might be misleading, as his verses more often reveal the gourmet, rather than the gourmand of eroticism.[12] The more to show the uncertain nature of Brazilian Parnassianism, we have the figures of Luiz Delfino and Luiz Murat, termed by some Parnassians and by others Romantics. Delfino has been called by Romero (_Livro do Centenario_, Vol. I, page 71), “for the variety and extent of his work, the best poet of Brazil.” The same critic, some thirty-three pages farther along in the same account, calls Murat deeper and more philosophic than Delfino, and equalled only by Cruz e Souza in the penetration of the human soul. And by the time (page 110, _Ibid._) he has reached the last-named of these poets, Cruz e Souza becomes “in many respects the best poet Brazil has produced.”