[3] There exists a people who lends its flag to cover such infamy and cowardice!… And allows it to be transformed, in this feast, into the impure cloak of a heartless bacchante!… My God! my God! but what flag is this that flutters impudently at the masthead? Silence, Muse … weep and weep so much that the banner will be bathed in your tears!… Green-gold banner of my country, kissed and blown by the breezes of Brazil, standard that enfolds in the light of the sun the divine promise of hope.… You who, after the war, was flown by the heroes at the head of their lances, rather had they shattered you in battle than that you should serve as a race’s shroud!… Horrible fatality that overwhelms the mind! Let the path that Columbus opened in the waves like a rainbow in the immense deep, shatter in this hour the polluted ship! This infamy is too much!… From your ethereal realm, O heroes of the New World, arise! Andrade! Tear that banner from the sky! Columbus! shut the fates of your sea! [4] No matter! Liberty is like the hydra, or like Antheus. If, exhausted, it rolls in the dust, it rises stronger than ever from the earth.… Its bleeding members are terrible, thirsting swords, and from the ashes cast upon the winds a new Gracchus arose! II JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS Had he been born in Europe and written, say, in French, Machado de Assis would perhaps be more than a name today--if he is that--to persons outside of his native country. As it is, he has become, but fourteen years after his death, so much a classic that many of his countrymen who will soon gaze upon his statue will surely have read scarcely a line of his work. He was too human a spirit to be prisoned into a narrow circle of exclusively national interests, whence the cry from some critics that he was not a national creator; on the other hand, his peculiar blend of melancholy charm and bitter-sweet irony have been traced to the mingling of different bloods that makes Brazil so fertile a field for the study of miscegenation. His work, as we all may read it, is, from the testimony of the few who knew him intimately, a perfect mirror of the retiring personality. His life and labours raised the letters of his nation to a new dignity. Monuments to such as he are monuments to the loftier aspirations of those who raise them, for the great need no statues.