I can not forget his sentences. They sing on and on in my mind. They have the charm of smooth satin. They feel good upon my tongue. _La luna—de esas claras lunas_.... The moon—one of those clear moons of tropic nights—was laughing down upon the water. Here is another: _In the sky the little stars were twinkling, while afar I could hear the night-thunder of the Carib Sea._ Fombona’s life has been worth while; poetic, enriched with vision, with conscious power—in Caracas, the city of his delight. It is something I like to think about. I can measure its invigorating pulse in his prose. I have esteem for the artist, and admiration for the man and brave fighter, who has never been a coward. In _Man of Iron_, Fombona makes the character which is both pitiful and noble, a man, just as Manuel Galvez does in one of his latest novels—_La Pasión de la Pampa_. And Fombona like Manuel Galvez registered so many of the apparently trifling, overlooked facts that knit up the confusing surface of the present; it resembles the difficult-to-catch, changeful, spread-out shimmer upon a sea. South Americans picture youth, and the joys of youth, as no one else. One can live over one’s own youth, and then multiple other youths by proxy, in the reading. And every once in a while I come upon a sentence that shakes me with its splendor. I am impressed by the fact that the literatures that Fombona reads and likes best are French, Italian, Russian. He sought literatures which could inspire him, which held the contagion of heat, Saxon races are colder, weaker perhaps in art-sense. They peg along diligently—more pedantically—with the consuming of many words like a faulty engine giving out smoke. I am carrying along as I say this, an undercurrent of memory of the stories of the English Buchan, which are so deadly dull; uninspired; devoid of artistry, of life. To me his books are sediment ... after sometime, somewhere, the pure, the sparkling wine has been withdrawn. Only rare humorless Americans could read them. The great earthquake in Caracas as Blanco-Fombona shows it to us, is masterly. And over it, the calm of night, and the yellow, resplendent moon of the tropics. I had a thrill from this chapter. Fombona was fascinated by the racial problem of the Americas, just as I have been. He insists the great problem here is racial. To quote him: “There is no racial unity, and consequently no national ideal.... We may not depend upon them of mixed blood, because now one element predominates, and now another, which education breaks up and still more confuses. Out of three Venezuelans—white, negro, and Indian, who could tell what could blend their energies into one? In each case the ideals are different; they have different tastes, different political impulses. We have no national soul.”