mer styles. He did much more; together with a few others, like Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera of Mexico, Darío brought back into Spanish the art of nuance, of delicate shading, in poetical style. This art, all but absent from Spanish poetry during two centuries, had been substituted by the forceful drawing and vivid coloring which foreigners expect to find in all things Spanish.
In the spirit of poetry, Rubén Darío succeeded in giving “des frissons nouveaux.” If not the first, he was one of the first (simultaneously with Gutiérrez Nájera, with Julian del Casal, of Cuba, and José Asunción Silva, of Colombia) to bring into Spanish the notes of subtle emotion of which Verlaine was arch master; the gracefulness and the brilliancy which emerge from the world of Versaillesque courts and feigned Arcadies; the decorative sense of a merely external Hellenism, which is delightful in its frank artificiality; the suggestions of exotic worlds, opulent storehouses of imaginative treasures.
But, while he did all this, he never lost his native force: he was, and he knew how to be, American,—Spanish-American, rather. He sang of his race, of his people,—the whole Spanish-speaking family of nations,—with constant love, with a tenderness which at times was almost childlike. If he did not always think that life in the New World was poetical, he did think
