In Mexico Espronceda and Lamartine inspired Fernando Calderon and Ignacio Rodriguez Galvan; Zorilla found a disciple in Manuel Flores, the poet of burning sensuality and savage nature. Brazil, as fruitful of romantics as Cuba, produced Gongalvez Diaz, who sang of the melancholy and nostalgia so well expressed by a word in his own tongue--_saudades_;--of sorrow, deliverance by knowledge, and the consolation of tears:--
"Men Deus, senhor men Deus, o que ha no mundo Que não seja soffrir? O homen nasce, e vive um so instante E soffre até morrir!"[7]
In his love poetry there is a very, beautiful sincerity, although we may recognise the influence of many masters--Byron, Zorilla, and the French romantics. Cited by him, this line of Saint-Beuve's:--
Casimiro de Abrou also essayed romantic subjects: solitude, misery, and exile. Alvares de Azevedo imitated Byron and De Musset, while a poet who did not versify, José de Alencar, expounded in his tales and novels a romantic conception of the Indian, simple and virtuous as one of Rousseau's characters.
We find this conception again in the work of a great poet of Uruguay, Zorilla de San Martin, who in _Tabaré_ sang the struggles of the greedy conquerors and the ingenuous Americans.
Romanticism was not with these men merely a matter of art; their lives were no less troublous and lyrical than their poetry. Rebels and nomads, thirsting for democratic liberty, they were wasted in the struggle with tyrants, or sent early to the scaffold or into exile, as though fate respected the unity of their troubled career. Thus these disciples of Lamartine, imaginative and sensual, vehement and melancholy in their art, gave a sombre yet vivid colouring to a period of American history, the years between 1840 and 1860.
Andrade was conspicuous among all for his sonorous eloquence; he was the greatest by virtue of the oratory, wealth, and ambitious grandeur of his poems, vast compositions which recall the _Légende des siècles_, the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, or the _Ahasuerus_ of Edgar Quinet. Doubtless he is not the equal of his masters. But devoid of melancholy and restless passion, his rhetoric, his verbal wealth, and his { 257} sybilline accents exercised a powerful influence. Repeating the grandiloquent excesses of Hugo, he was the poet of democracy and the Latin race.