Of his sonnet sequences I enjoy the _Versailles Sequence_ best. He learned how to make it from Heredia. But a good thing is good, bastard or honest-born. Lines cling to memory. Such for instance as: _Ce mépris de la mort, comme une fleur aux levres!_ But it should not have closed with an exclamation point. Perhaps it did not! My memory is at fault. There is no need of blowing a trumpet after such a line. Silvá, like Venice, is a phantom of delight, I can never forget. He was _an exquisite_, on a level with Petronius, and he lived in a city to which patrician memories and the royal pride, of that royal race, the Spanish, had been transplanted, Bogotá. He loved butterflies and childhood and the first early nights of May; fleeting things, light lovelinesses which pause only long enough to die. He loved the flight of swallows which he liked to call the wings of Spring. I have read verses of his which give me exactly the same sensation as verses of the Greek Anthology. Old windows were another passion of his. Very frequently occur the words, _vieja ventana_. _En la estrecha calle una muy vieja ventana colonial_ _Penetrando al traves de los rejas de antigua ventana_ _El cantor ... de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barra_ _Per la antigua ventana que de sobre al jardin—_ ... _del espacio la negra sombre flitran por la ventana rayos de luna_ ... I think of him as the _poet of windows_. I wonder why they fascinated him so? Were they symbols of escape? Or did they spread out vistas for him? Always in his lines, for me, there is some maddening, unseizable beauty, which holds me helpless like a magnet, makes me a speechless, but willing prisoner. His little posthumous book of verse (The greater number of his poems together with all his short stories and most of his prose, were lost in shipwreck on the Venezuelan coast.) is a musicale diary of his days, _alas! so few_. Here transformed, then preserved in beauty, we find fact. A new use of recurrent sound, with him wholly personal, spots phrases with weird echoes, insistent wild, wayward emotion. There slips over us continually the sad shiver of faint, far fairy bells. There are rhythms like the clash of armor-resonant; and rhythms like the shrill song of little yellow birds at dawn. He says that among verse-forms, the sonnet is king.