The poetic flowers in his sonnets are overgrown by luxuriant parasitical weeds. In the first Century of the sonnets in the Portuguese language love is the only theme. The introductory sonnet announces that they are intended to celebrate the “penetrating shafts of love, which were shot from a pair of heavenly eyes, and which after inflicting immortal wounds, issued triumphant from the poet’s breast.”[269] This style pervades the whole collection. In one place a tender swain, named Menalio, forbids the satyres of the wood to steep their feet in the brook which has served as a bath to the fair Albania, that “morning-star, who in the depth of the water is the first of suns, where the sun himself is dazzled.”[270] On another occasion the poet complains of the “bitter taste he experiences in his mouth,” when he describes his pain to his mistress.[271] Sometimes it is scarcely possible to guess the meaning of these romantic conceits. But this style of poetic composition was by the admirers of Faria e Sousa denominated the ingenious and the tender style. The principal sonnets in the second Century pursue the same theme of romantic love, but they are sometimes so charming that the beauty of the successful passages, nearly throws into shade the distortions by which even that beauty is more or less alloyed.[272] Among the moral sonnets in this Century there are several which, though not abounding in ingenious ideas, are nevertheless expressive pictures of sentiment.[273] The _sonetos sacros_ (spiritual sonnets), with which the collection closes, are, however, destitute of all trace of poetic merit. Whatever deserves to be pointed out as remarkable in the twelve Portuguese eclogues of Faria e Sousa, may with propriety be included in the notice respecting the degree of merit which this industrious writer possessed as a poetic theorist.