[1] The so-called Modernist movement (another meaningless name!) was really not a movement, but a scattered reaction against Spanish academic domination. It was French in inspiration and chiefly behind the lead of the Decadents resulted in a species of continental affirmation. I have tried, in my _Studies in Spanish-American Literature_, New York, 1920, to show the emergence of this affirmation, from the romantic predecessors in the New World and the French background, to such salient personalities as Darío, Rodó, Eguren, Blanco-Fombona and Chocano. [2] Oh, immortal century (i. e., the nineteenth), oh, century in which conquest, war, religions and the ancient monarchies have crumbled to earth, loathsome as harpies, gloomy as the desert! I bow before thee, touch my knee to the earth, that I may pray to thine ideal titanic, starry bust! [3] You’re not the same, oh flower of _morbidezza_, queen of the Adriatic! Glittering Jordan of love, where the wandering Musset drank lustral beauty in waves. Your smile, oh triumphal Venice, is gone--olympic diamond that was set in the heroic forehead of the lord, bard and lover, immortally great. Your dark lagoon no longer hears the plangent strains of the olden serenade,--the sighs of love heaved by the voluptuous patrician in your gondolas.… There remains but the yearnful song of San Marco’s moaning pigeons. [4] Op. Cit P. 301. [5] Ibid. P. 303. [6] _Estudos_ 2a serie, P. 283. The book was published in Portugal, in 1872, and was “read and admired here in 1872. The _Miniaturas_, the poems of which bear dates from 1867, to 1870, mention the poet as a Brazilian, native of Rio de Janeiro. He was, in fact, such by birth, by intention, and, what is of more importance, by intuition and sentiment, genuinely Brazilian. We ought, then, to count this, his first book, despite the fact that it was conceived and generated abroad, in the roster of our Parnassianism, and perhaps as one of its principal factors.” See, however, Afranio Peixoto’s splendid two-volume edition of the _Obras Completas de Castro Alves_, Rio de Janeiro, 1921, for a refutation of this opinion. (Page 15.) According to Alberto de Oliveira there are decided Parnassian leanings in Castro Alves’s _Espumas Fluctuantes_, 1870, in the sonnets called _Os anjos da meia noite_ (Midnight Angels.) [7] It exercises over me a gentle tyranny that fills me with pride and casts me down; there is in this magnetism such power, an electricity that fascinates me and draws me to the edge of an abyss. And I, inert, without will power, make no attempt to flee. [8] Op. Cit. Page 307. The italics are mine.