I am not sure that the Brazilians do not confuse their admiration for Alves’s short life and its noble dedication with the very variable quality of his poetry. Read by one with no Latin blood in his veins it seems too often a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, freighted with a few central slogans rather than any depth of idea. I speak now of the work as a whole and not of the outstanding poems, such as _As vozes da Africa_ (Voices from Africa), _O Navio Negreiro_ (The Slave Ship), _Pedro Ivo_. It is in these few exceptions that the poet will live, but just as surely, it seems to me, will his esthetic importance shrink to smaller proportions than the national criticism today accords it. The ever-scrupulous, ever-truthful Verissimo, who does not join the general chorus of uncritical admiration of Castro Alves, indicates that even his strongest claim upon us--that of a singer of the slaves--is injured by an evident exaggeration. What might be called Alves’s “Africanism” is thus condemned of untruth to artistic as well as to quotidian reality, in much the same manner as was the “Indianism” in the poetry of Gonçalves Dias.… “The lack of objective reality offends us and our taste, habituated as we are to the reality of life transported to artistic representations. As I have already had occasion to observe, Castro Alves’s defect as a poet of the slaves is that he idealized the slave, removing him from reality, perhaps in greater degree than art permits, making him escape--which is evidently false--the inevitable degradation of slavery. His slaves are Spartacuses or belong to the gallery of Hugo’s _Burgaves_. Now, socially, slavery is hateful chiefly because of its degrading influence upon the human being reduced to it and by reaction upon the society that supports it.” * * * * * When Castro Alves prepared the _Espumas Fluctuantes_ for publication he already felt the hand of death upon him. In the short foreword that he wrote for the book--in a style that is poetry, though written as prose--he compared his verses to the floating spume of the ocean, whence the title of the book. “Oh spirits wandering over the earth! O sails bellying over the main!… You well know how ephemeral you are … passengers swallowed in dark space, or into dark oblivion.… And when--actors of the infinite--you disappear into the wings of the abyss, what is left of you?… A wake of spume … flowers lost amid the vast indifference of the ocean.--A handful of verses … spume floating upon the savage back of life!…” This mood, this language, this outlook, are more than half of the youngster that was Castro Alves. For the most part he is not original, either in form or idea; the majority of his verses seem to call for the rostrum and the madly moved audience. Yet more than fifty years after his death the numerous editions of his poems provide that rostrum, and the majority of his literate countrymen form that audience.