In the history of Brazilian poetry Castro Alves may be regarded as a figure characterized by the more easily recognized traits of romanticism plus the infiltration of social ideas into the sentimental content. Some would even discover in a few of his products the first signs of the nascent Parnassianism in Brazil. Long before Carvalho selected him as the chief exponent of social themes in the romantic period, Verissimo had indicated that Castro Alves was “our first social poet, the epic writers excepted. He is the first to have devoted a considerable part of his labours not to sentimental subjectivism, which constitutes the greatest and the best part of our poetry, but to singing or idealizing social feeling, fact and aspiration.” Hugo is his great god; … “nosso velho Hugo.--mestre do mundo! Sol da eternidade!” he exclaims in _Sub tegmine fagi_. “Our old Hugo. Master of the world! Sun of eternity!” Alves, often even in his love poetry, seems to orate from the mountain tops. “Let us draw these curtains over us,” he sings in _Boa Noite_ (Good Night); “they are the wings of the archangel of love.” Or, in the _Adeus de Thereza_, if time passes by, it must be “centuries of delirium, Divine pleasures … delights of Elysium.…” His language, as often as not, is the language of poetic fever; image clashes upon image; antithesis runs rife; verses flow from him like lava down the sides of a volcano. Nothing human seems alien to his libertian fervour. He captures the Brazilian imagination by giving its fondness for eloquence ideas to feed upon.[1] Now he is singing the glories of the book and education, now upbraiding the assassin of Lincoln, now glorifying the rebel, now picturing the plight of the wretched slaves in words that are for all the world like a shower of sparks. In his quieter moments he can sing love songs as tender as the cooing of any dove, as in _O Laco de fito_; he can indite the most graceful and inviting of bucolics as in _Sub tegmine fagi_; and this softer note is an integral part of his labours.