stic unity in Spanish
America.

Bello wrote little original verse during these last years
of his life. At one time he became exceedingly fond
of Victor Hugo and even tried to imitate him; but his
classical training and methodical habits made success
impossible. His best poetic work during his residence in
Chile, however, are translations of Victor Hugo, and his
free metrical rendering of _La Priere pour tous_ (from
the _Feuilles d'automne_), is amongst his finest and most
popular verses.

It is interesting that Andres Bello, the foremost
of Spanish-American scholars in linguistics and in
international law, should also have been a preeminent
poet, and yet all critics, except possibly a few of the
present-day "_modernistas_," place his _American Silvas_
amongst the best poetic compositions of all Spanish
America. The _Silvas_ are two in number: the _Alocucion
a la poesia_ and the _Silva a la agricultura de la zona
torrida_. The first is fragmentary: apparently the poet
despaired of completing it, and he embodied in the second
poem an elaboration of those passages of the first work
which describe nature in the tropics. The _Silvas_ are in
some degree imitations of Virgil's _Georgics_, and they
are the best of Spanish imitations. Menendez y Pelayo, who
is not too fond of American poets, is willing to admit
(_Ant._, II, p. cxlii) that Bello is, "in descriptive and
Georgic verse, the most Virgilian of our (Spanish) poets."
Caro, in his splendid biography of Bello (in Miguel
Antonio Caro's introduction to the _Poesias de Andres
Bello_, Madrid, 1882) classifies the _Silvas_ as
"scientific poetry," which is quite true if this sort of
poetry gives an esthetic conception of nature, expressed
in beautiful terms and adorned with descriptions of
natural objects. It is less true of the _Alocucion_, which
is largely historical, in that it introduces and sings
the praises of towns and persons that won fame in the
revolutionary wars. The _Silva a la agricultura_, page 318
which is both descriptive and moral, may be best described
in the words of Caro. It is, says this distinguished
critic, "an account of the beauty and wealth of nature in
the tropics, and an exhortation to those who live in
the equator that, instead of wasting their strength in
political and domestic dissensions, they should devote
themselves to agricultural pursuits." Bello's interest
in nature had doubtless been stimulated by the coming of
Humbo