his work night after night till the first songs of birds announced the dawn, writing in or after a paroxysm of grief or excitement in his own life, he first lived, then swiftly set on paper, the incidents of his novels--_Amor de Perdição_ was written in a fortnight. Their plot may be ill constructed, the delineation of characters shallow, Balzac _manqué_, the episodes far-fetched and melodramatic, but they corresponded, if not to life, to the life of their author and thereby attained intensity of style and a certain unity of action. Yet he was always greatly concerned with schools and tendencies (he imitated Émile Zola in _Eusebio Macario_, although he declared the realistic school to be the perversion of Nature, Émile Souvestre in _As Tres Irmãs_, Octave Feuillet in _Romance de um Homem Rico_), sure of his genius but not of the channels into which he should direct it, at his best perhaps in brief essays and sketches from which his high-flown romanticism is absent, as in the studies of the lives of criminals in _Memorias do Carcere_ (2 vols., 1862) and his many scattered reminiscences of life in Minho, the valley of the Tamega, and Oporto. With his sensitive restless temperament, his imagination, his satire and sadness (of tears rather than _saudade_, for which the action in his stories is too rapid), his intolerant hatred of tyranny and intolerance, his essential interest not in things nor even characters but in life and passion, and his unfailing power of expression, he may well be called ‘the [modern] Portuguese genius personified’.[676] His life is a strange contrast to the almost idyllic serenity of that of ANTONIO FELICIANO DE CASTILHO (1800-75), whose admirable persistency as poet and translator during a period of nearly sixty years--he had been blind from the age of six--enabled him to attain an extraordinary pre-eminence in Portuguese poetry after Garrett and other poets had been broken like crystals while he remained as a tile upon the housetop. A romantic with a natural leaning to perfection of form, he always retained something of the Arcadian school, and like the Arcadians sought his inspiration in Bernardim Ribeiro and other bucolic _quinhentistas_. Unsympathetic critics incapable of appreciating Castilho’s masterly style may feel that in the twenty-one letters of the _Cartas de Echo e Narciso_ (1821), in _A Primavera_ (1822)[677] and _Amor e Melancholia ou a Novissima Heloisa_ (1828) he combined the classical school’s dearth of thought with the diffuseness of the romantics. But his _quadras_ (_A Visão_, _O São João_, _A Noite do Cemiterio_) and his blank verse are alike so easy and natural, his style so harmonious and pure that, despite the lack of observation and originality in these long poems, they have not even to-day lost their place in Portuguese literature. In their soft, vague melancholy and gentle grace they were even more popular than his romantic poems, _A Noite do Castello_ (1836)[678]