_Yo habia desde muy joven tenedos occasion, si bien rares veces, de observar la presencia y la accion de las fuerzas misteriosas y extraños_.... “Several times during my life I have had the opportunity to take note of the presence and action of forces beyond this world of ours.... In _Caros y Caretos_ I have written about them. There, I told once how, in the Square of the Cathedral of León in Nicaragua, in the early dawn, I saw and touched one who had passed beyond.... At the moment I was sane and in complete possession of my powers of mind and judgment.” Darío and Lugones talked often together about the occult sciences. It was in July, 1890, that Darío came to Guatamala. He had been hired to edit a paper. On this paper his collaborator was young Gomez Carrillo, of whom Darío wrote at that moment, as follows: ... he was a young fellow with brilliant eyes and a sensual face, touched with the hue of tropic suns—and he was enjoying his first love affairs. Darío, and three other poets, had a comical experience. In a most amusing manner, they prevented the Cathedral of San Juan from being destroyed by a cannon. The General in command was eager to show how well he could shoot. He summoned his friends for the exhibition—among them Darío—and the poets. Down there—poets are everywhere! He gave a dinner. Darío suggested that he put off the shooting until each improvised a poem. The General agreed. They spun the poems out one entire night. They improvised and improvised. After a time the General fell asleep, and in the morning he awoke so hungry, and so tired, that he forgot about the Cathedral. It was saved. The prose of Carillo is good. An immense charm coupled with immense primeval fury, is in Chocano, who calls himself—_el almo primitivo de los Andes_. Once I just missed Chocano, by an half-hour, at a South American hotel—I have regretted it many half-hours. He has, _in excelsis_, just what the poets of our north do not have. We should like and enjoy our Latin neighbors to the South greatly, if we knew their tongue better, and through that, their rich and varied art. Remy de Gourmont writes of Silvá (José Asuncion—the poet and prose writer of Bogotá) as follows: “The old eloquent tongue of Castile has been born again and made more virile in the colonies of South America. The Spanish which Silvá writes is more subtile, flexible, clear, than harsh classical Spanish.” He goes on to say that Silvá’s reading of French has helped him construct a new tongue, with memories of French sentence structure and more sensitive to the rhythm of thought. It is now more than a quarter of a century since I translated for my own countrymen, who had no interest in it—Silvá’s immortal poem, _The Nocturn_—which every cultivated South American knows by heart.