As Napoleon, before the pyramids, told his soldiers that forty centuries gazed down upon them, so Alves, in the opening poem of _Os Escravos_ called _O Seculo_ (The Century), invoking the names of liberty’s heroes--Christ, Carnaris, Byron, Kossuth, Juarez, the Gracchi, Franklin--told the youth of his nation that from the heights of the Andes, vaster than plains or pyramids, there gazed down upon them “a thousand centuries.” Even in numbers he is true to the high-flown conceits of the _condoreiro_ school; the raising of Napoleon’s forty to the young Brazilian’s thousand is indicative of the febrile passion that flamed in all his work. Castro Alves was a torch, not a poem. When he beholds visions of a republic (as in _Pedro Ivo_), man himself becomes a condor, and liberty, like the poet’s truth, though crushed to earth will rise again. Não importa! A liberdade E como a hydra, o Antheu. Se no chão rola sem forças, Mais forte do chão se ergueu.… São os seus ossos sangrentos Gladios terriveis, sedentos.… E da cinza solta aos ventos Mais um Graccho appareceu!…[4] This is not poetry that can be read for very long at a time. It is not poetry to which one returns in quest of mood, evocative beauty, or surrender to passion. It is the poetry of eloquence, with all the grandeur of true eloquence and with many of the lesser qualities of oratory at its less inspiring level. Castro Alves, then, was hardly a poet of the first order. He sang, in pleasant strains, of love and longing; he whipped the nation’s conscience with poems every line of which was a lash; some of his verses rise like a pungent incense from the altars where liberty’s fire is kept burning; he was a youthful soul responsive to every noble impulse. But his passion is too often spoiled by exaggeration,--the exaggeration of a temperament as well as a school that borrowed chiefly the externals of Hugo’s genius. Nor is it the exaggeration of feeling; rather is it a forcing of idea and image, accent and antithesis,--the failings of the orator who sees his hearers before him and must have visible, audible token of their assent. So that, when all is said and done, the permanent contribution of Alves to Brazilian poetry is small, consisting of a few love poems, several passionate outcries on behalf of a downtrodden race, and a group of stanzas variously celebrating libertarian ideas. All the rest we can forget in the intense appeal of the surviving lines. I know that this does not agree with the current acceptation of the poet in Brazil, where many look upon him as the national poet, but one can only speak one’s honest convictions. With reference to Castro Alves, I admire the man in the poet more than the poet in the man. FOOTNOTES: