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 sybilline accents exercised a powerful influence. Repeating the grandiloquent excesses of Hugo, he was the poet of democracy and the Latin race.
His Atlantide is the Latin future; Prometheus the eternal battle of thought and fanaticism. He is full of Spanish arrogance. Marvellously sonorous, his stanzas proclaim, with pomp and majesty, a romantic faith in America and liberty. The soul of Rome "destined to inaugurate history and embrace space," lives again beyond the ocean; Spain was the heir at first, until she choked beneath the "enervating shadow of the Papacy." France,
"Montana en cuya cumbre
Anida el genio humano,"[[9]]
was now the leading Latin nation, and Napoleon the instrument of the ancient imperial spirit. His sword
"Que sobre el mapa de la Europa absorta
Trazó fronteras, suprimió desiertos
Y que quizás de recibir cansada
El homenaje de los reyes vivos,
Fuá á demandar en el confin remote,
El homenaje de los reyos muertos."[[10]]
Andrade believed in the sacred rôle of the poet: Hugo, his admired master,
"La voz de trueno del gran profeto hebreo
La cuerda de agrios tonos
De Juvenal
Y el rumor de los cantos
Del viejo Gibelino,"[[11]]