To obtain this object, it was, however, only necessary that a poet should arise, who, charmed by the renewed union of Portuguese and Italian poetry, might be induced to place himself under the tutelage of the early Italian poets. Thus would the Italian opera have rendered compensation for the evils to which it had given birth. A Brazilian, named Claudio Manoel da Costa, was one of the first writers who in this way contributed to reintroduce an elevated style into Portuguese poetry.[358] Born in the province of Minas Geraes, that part of Brazil where the chief object is the working of mines, he seems not to have been destined for the service of the muses. He indeed passed through a course of academic studies in Europe; but he himself states that during the five years which he spent at the university of Coimbra, no kind of poetry was there held in esteem, save that which was composed in the corrupt but fashionable style of the Portuguese Marinists. That young Da Costa, while at the university of Coimbra, should have applied himself to the study and imitation of the older Italian poets, and of Metastasio, was a circumstance peculiarly favourable to his improvement, while at the same time it afforded the first proof of his being destined to arrive at a point of purer cultivation than his contemporaries. He even ventured on the composition of Petrarchic sonnets in the Italian language, and in this attempt he was not unsuccessful. On his return to Brazil his poetic studies were continued in the region of gold and diamond treasures, to which he seems to have attached but little value; for he complains that amidst these mountains, no Arcadian stream awakes by its sweet murmur harmonious verse: and that the turbid waters of the brooks only serve to call to recollection the rapacious perseverance of the miners by whose labour they are discoloured. On his own poems he pronounces a remarkable judgment. He observes that he was too late in learning the rules of good taste from the Greeks, Italians and French; and that influenced by bad example, he sinned against principles, the justice of which he recognized. The perverted manner of the sonnetists of the seventeenth century is certainly here and there perceptible in the writings of Da Costa. But upon the whole, it may be said, that for nearly the space of a century, no Portuguese writer had so well succeeded in that kind of sonnet poetry, which most charmingly approximates to the style of Petrarch; and that in the other compositions of this Brazilian poet, the faults are counterbalanced by merits of the most pleasing kind. The sonnets included in the collection of his poetic works, amount to nearly a hundred; and among them are some in Italian, but none in the Spanish language. The style of these sonnets, nearly all of which have love for their subject, is, however, not altogether that of Petrarch. They possess a certain tone of poignancy, which betrays the spirit of modern times.