"Que los hombres ya me niegan
Una tumba en sus ciudades
En mi patria me expulsaron
De la casa de mis padres."[[6]]
These romantics were not, like Rousseau, inclined toward the simple life by an excess of artificial civilisation. Their melancholy, when it is not an echo of exotic griefs, is the cry of anguish of a noble mind lost in a barbarous republic. This contrast between the man and his surroundings very clearly explains the strong hold obtained by the romantic ideal; the literature of passion, pride, and revolt, it expresses a social condition of inner conflict and solitude.
The Argentine, Marmol, imitates Byron in his Pilgrim. Grandiloquent, passionate, and mournful, he curses the tyranny of Rosas. Echeverria, under a classic mantle, barely hides his romantic subjectivity, full of passion and a vague melancholy. In Venezuela Heriberto Garcia de Quevedo left a legacy of prodigiously long poems.
In Cuba Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanada, wearied and lyrical, exalted love in the accents of De Musset; the mulatto Placido wrote musical descriptive verse; Juan Clemente Zenea, translator of Leopardi and Longfellow, confessed, in musical elegiac verse, his disabused outlook upon life; and greater than any, Hérédia, the singer of Niagara, a fiery, suffering spirit, full of contrasts as his art, tells us of his sorrow and his faith; he sings of love and nature in beautiful imagery, admiring both the divine might and the intoxicating sensuality of the tropics.
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:—
"Mon Dieu, fais que je puisse aimer!"[[8]]
enables us to understand his plaints.