I read Lamennais: _Paroles d’un Croyant_. He writes like an inspired prophet, to stir masses to unrest, rebellion. His sentences ring like clarions. Magnificently curses fall. It is peculiar how he gives words the quality of metal. Other people use the same words. They are nothing at all. It has been said that there has been no name so execrated as _Machiavelli_. He is the supremely hated. An Italian critic writing of him declares: “Voltaire hated him, and Frederick the Great; the Jesuits, and Cardinal Polo. He could only be right in a world in which there are no spiritual truths.” It is a strange thing that living in Italy, at a period when the Church dominated it, he should have written just that book. There is not necessarily anything important in a likeness. There are resemblances in the world for which in our present condition of knowledge we are unable to account. When José Asuncion Silvá, poet of Bogotá, who wrote a poem that recalls Poe’s _Raven_, was in Paris sight-seeing with friends, he happened to pause, by accident, one day in the Louvre, beside the marble bust of Lucius Verus. To their amazement, his friends found that the head of Silvá and that of the dissolute Roman lover of Faustine, were identical. A photograph of Silvá with hair and beard dressed like the statue, was made the next day, and the result is something that no one can explain. They are as alike as two peas. I have the pictures. Years ago the _Mercure de France_ sent its representative all the way to South America, and then on to Bogotá, city no railroad has succeeded approaching, to secure information about _The Nocturn_ which critics call the greatest poem written in the Americas. The only notice of him in the U. S. was my translation of the poem of which the dead poet’s publishers approved. If you wish to revel in the beauties of the tropics, minus the long voyage to South America, weeks perhaps of sea-sickness, read Chocano, who laughingly calls himself _the spirit of the Andes_. He has pictured, in ringing verse, this glowing, romantic continent, from which, in days of old, clipper ships, used to go back to Europe with scuppers awash with emeralds, gold, with amethysts. Reading Chocano gives the rich sensations of the tropics. It is like wandering through vast gardens filled with flaming orchids, curious in shape, amazing in color. Just so evocative is he, varied. Just so seemingly inexhaustible. Another poet, but in the Portuguese tongue, to the south, is Machado de Assis, of the celebrated poems which all Brazilians know: _Uma Creatura_, _Suave Mare Magno_, _No Alto_. The sonnet which he wrote to his wife is one of the noblest in the Portuguese tongue. Machado de Assis was telling South America of Chinese poets, translating and publishing versions of them, an half century ago. We are just getting around to it. They have kept over us of the north, the æsthetic superiority of Mediterranean peoples among whom they originated.