Noites do Norte

Slavery will remain for a long time as Brazil's national characteristic.
It spread over our vast solitudes a great softness; its contact was the first form that the virgin nature of the country received, and it was the one it kept; it populated it as if it were a natural and living religion, with its myths, its legends, its enchantments; it breathed into it its childlike soul, its sorrows without weight, its tears without bitterness, its silence without concentration, its joys without cause, its happiness without tomorrow...
It is the undefinable sigh that exhales in the moonlight our northern nights.