But what brought fame to Castro Alves was his civic, social note. From Heine, to whom he is indebted for something of his social aspiration, he took as epigraph for his collection _Os Escravos_, a sentiment that reveals his own high purpose. “Flowers, flowers! I would crown my head with them for the fray. The lyre! Give me, too, the lyre, that I may chant a song of war.… Words like flaming stars that, falling, set fire to palaces and bring light to hovels.… Words like glittering arrows that shoot into the seventh heaven and strike the imposture that has wormed into the holy of holies.… I am all joy, all enthusiasm; I am the sword, I am the flame!…” The quotation is almost a description of Alves’s method. Once again, for the part of _Os Escravos_ that was published separately five years after his death, we find an epigraph from Heine prefacing _A Cachoeira de Paulo Affonso_ (The Paulo Affonso Falls): “I do not really know whether I shall have deserved that some day a laurel should be placed upon my bier. Poetry, however great be my love for it, has ever been for me only a means consecrated to a holy end.… I have never attached too great a value to the fame of my poems, and it concerns me little whether they be praised or blamed. It should be a sword that you place upon my tomb, for I have been a brave soldier in the war of humanity’s deliverance.” This, too, is a description of Castro Alves. He was a sword rather than a lyre; certainly his verse shows a far greater preoccupation with purpose than with esthetic illumination, and just as certainly does he fall far short of both Hugo and Heine in their frequent triumph over whatever purpose they professed.