ANTHERO DE QUENTAL[694] (1842-91), the Coimbra student who waved the banner of revolt against a too complacent romanticism in 1865, was that rare thing in Portuguese literature, a poet who thinks. Powerfully influenced by German philosophy and literature, his was a tortured spirit, and when in his sincerity he attempted to translate his philosophy into action the result was too often failure. Born at Ponta Delgada in the Azores, he studied law at Coimbra from 1858 to 1864, became a socialist, worked for some time as a compositor in Paris, in spite of his independent means; then, after a visit to the United States of America, settled at Lisbon for some years and figured as an active socialist. Weary and ill, he retired in 1882 to the quieter town in the north, Villa do Conde, but he could not escape from his own turbulent thoughts and nine years later he shot himself in a square of his native town. If his life was ineffectual in its series of broken, noble impulses, there is nothing vague or uncertain about the splendid sonnets of _Odes Modernas_ (1865) and _Sonetos_ (1881). They are the effect, often perfectly tranquil, of a previous agony of thought, like brimmed furrows reflecting clear skies after rain. His search was for truth, not for words to express it, far less for words to describe his own sensations. Indeed, he was far from considering poetry as an end in itself and destroyed more of his poems than his friends published. In his autobiographical letter addressed to Dr. Storck in 1887 he states that his poetry was written _involuntariamente_. That is to say, after much thought on the great problems of existence verse came to him unrhetorical and spontaneous, as it did to João de Deus without any thought whatever: Já sossega depois de tanta luta, Já me descansa em paz o coraçam. Quental’s poems owe their strength and intensity to the fact that they had passed through the fire of _tanta luta_.