We may not even enumerate his writings. He produced graceful poems, strong novels, realistic descriptions, delicate but trenchant criticism, strong discourses, truthful biographies. He ever urged the development of a national, a characteristic literature, and pleaded for the utilization of national material. Unfortunately, his writings are scattered through periodicals difficult of access. A collection of them is now being made. Our selections are taken from his _Revista Literaria_ (Literary Review) of 1861, from a discussion of Poetry dated 1870, and from his well-known _Paisajes y Leyendas_ (Landscapes and Legends) of 1884. GENIUS AND OBSTACLES. Rigorously speaking, it can not be said that popular neglect can be a chain which holds _genius_ in the dust of impotence. No: the genius, powerful and lofty eagle, knows how to break with his talons the vulgar bonds with which the pettiness of the world may attempt to shackle thought. Thus Homer, aged beggar, to whose eyes the sun denied its light, but whose divine soul inspiration illuminated, was able to endow ungrateful Greece, in return for his miserable bread, with the majesty of Olympus, with the glory of the heroes and with the immortality of those eternal songs which survive the decay of the agonies and the ruin of empires. Thus, Dante, proscribed by his countrymen, has been able to cause to spring from the depths of his hatred and his grief the omnipotent ray which was to illuminate the conscience of his time and to be the admiration of future ages. Thus, that other blind man, who, as Byron says, made the name _Miltonic_ synonym of _sublime_ and who died as he had lived the sworn enemy of tyrants, in the cell to which ingratitude consigned him, improvised for himself a throne, and from its dominated creation saw prostrate themselves at his feet not only his country, but the world. Thus Cervantes, the poor cripple, disdained by persons of distinction and persecuted by fortune created, in the midst of the agony of misery, the sole treasure which can not be wrested from old Spain, more precious truly than the ephemeral grandeur of kings and the imbecile pride of nobles. Thus lastly, Camoens, soldier also like Cervantes, and like him unfortunate, left in his deathbed in a foreign hospital, as a great legacy to his country, his _Lusiadas_, the most beautiful monument of Portuguese glory. Thus many others, dead through the hemlock of contemporary disdain, and compensated with tardy apotheosis, have not found obstacles in poverty, in envy and in defeat; and abandoning with thought the narrow spheres of the world, have gone to grave their names upon the heaven of poetry. But such is the privilege of genius and of genius only. The talents which cannot aspire to such height, nor feel themselves endowed with force divine, are eclipsed in the test, the same test which causes him, who is predestined for sublimity, to shine forth more resplendent and more grand.