It was indeed a talent, an energy, a force that this young student of the Ateneo Municipal who, at thirteen, barely out of his native pueblo of Calamba, composed a melodrama in verse, Junto al Pasig, which applauded the elegant society of Manila; that this adolescent who, with an ode, To the Philippine Youth, first won the first prize in the competition of the "Liceo Artistico-Literario", and still triumphed in a literary tournament organized on the occasion of the centenary of Cervantes, with a composition in prose, the Council of the Gods, imprinted with the purest Hellenism.
