The Colombian Caro believed in the "consoling mission" of the poet, and this mission, for the Argentine Andrade, was a priesthood and a prophetic gift. The poet appears "when the human caravan changes its route in the desert." But as a result of this mission Nemesis inflicts solitude and suffering. { 254} The South American poets abandon the world as a result of their despair:--
"Sufrirás el martirio Que al nació poeta Reserva el hado impío,"[3]
"Yo vivo solamente cuando feliz deliro Que los terrenos lazos mi corazón rompió. . . . . . Venid porque yo gozo yo vivo solamente Si pienso que he dejado la humanidad detras."[4]
The Peruvian Salaverry contemplates his heart:--
"Cual la ruina de un templo silencioso Vacío, abandonado, pavoroso, Sin luz y sin rumor."[5]
José Eusebio Caro, who has sung of liberty in admirable strophe, would hide himself in the forest:--
"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 { 255} 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.