“ Modern Belgium, "between ardent France and grave Germany," the focus of all the roads of Europe, is as rich in intellectual gifts as it is teeming with material wealth. "The vitality of the Belgians," says Stefan Zweig in his splendid book on Verhaeren, "is magnificent. In no other part of Europe is life lived with such intensity, such gaiety. In no other country as in Flanders is excess in sensuality and pleasure a function of strength. The Flemings must be seen in their sensual life, in the avidity they bring to it, in the conscious joy they feel in it, in the endurance they show. ”

“ Grégoire Le Roy has been an electrician, and is now Librarian of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts at Brussels. He is the poet of retrospection, as Maeterlinck is the poet of introspection. His heart "pleure d'autrefois." He is the hermit bowed down by silver hair, bending at eventide over the embers of the past, visited by weird guests draped with legend. The weft of his verse is torn by translation, it cannot be grasped, it is wafted through shadows. ”

“ Listen, and think! I am she
Who opens thine eyes in dream.
I am the wonderful beam
Of a mystery unveiled to thee.
I am hot as the sun at heaven's steep,
And more than smoke I am light;
And I glide through the odours of night
To visit thee in thy sleep."
[Pg 123]
THE BRIDE OF BRIDES.
O thou who hauntest my nights, Spectre of Time, immense,
Voiceless, eternal shadow, Monster for whose feet we hark,
And peer for thy marrowless bones in vain through the darkness dense,
I know thou art near me ... I tremble, and wait for thee in the dark.
O shame! Am I stricken with terror? ”

“ Out of the world in my sick, vain defiance;
I have lifted, under the roofs of night,
The golden marbles of a hostile science
To the barred summits of black oracles;
But the King of the Night is Death;
And man but in the dawning's breath
His enigmatic effort spells;
When flowers unclose, prayer too uncloses,
With the scent of prayer their lips are sweet,
And the white sun on a nacreous water-sheet
Is a kiss that on man's lips reposes;
Dawn is a counsel to be bold,
And he who hearkens is tenfold
Saved from the marsh that never yet cleansed sin. ”

“ Was it a vain dream? O you centaurs smiting
With roving hoofs your rocks and herbless sods,
O you whose shape, a man's and beast's uniting,
[Pg 139] Shelters a secret fire that makes you gods!
You who quaffed life with its abundance drunken!
Your transports I have known in olden days,
In evenings when, like you in silence sunken,
I drove along the darkened forest ways!
In me, ye savage gods, your strength was seething;
And, when a sacred madness through me ran,
In the pent breath the foliage was breathing
I deemed me one of you, I mortal man.
ÉMILE VERHAEREN. 1855—. ”

“ In which some poet, skilled in life's distress,
Breathed into olden, golden verse his sighs.
Sometimes he lifts his head, and feeds his eyes,
With all the wonderment that wise men know,
On fields, and clouds that over forests go,
[Pg 136] And with their calmness sated is his thought.
He knows how dearly fair renown is bought:
He too, in earlier days of stinging strength,
Sought that vain victory to find at length
Sadness at his desire's precipitous brink....
Of what avail, he thought, to act and think,
When human joy holds all in one rapt look? ”

“ The greatest chord of all the lyre.
And to the gravest chord of all he saith
Hope that for very youth soars in a breath,
And stretching like a wakened beast desire....
And lo! already, by the willows of the river,
Beautiful Joy who passes binding crowns turns her aside.
And suddenly tempestuous grief rings far and wide,
Its strength awakening from the mystery of the chords
Dream-voices that deliver....
And lo! our fists are clenched and leaping towards
Death's iron gates, and bruised recoiling thence. ”

“ Of haggard eyes in sheaves of brandished flesh.
The frenzy climbs, and sinks to rise still higher,
Rolls like exasperated tides,
And backwards glides,
Until the moment when dawn fills the port,
And Death, tired of the sport,
Back to ships and homesteads sweeps and harries
The limp debauch and human weed
[Pg 189] That on the pavement tarries.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed,
Where lightning madness stains
Foreheads with rotting pains,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers that feed
The city and the sea. ”

“ A voice flees, when the breeze has touched and passed,
And glides within the singing chords....
As a light wind sings at a vessel's mast,
The sweet breath mounting from the river towards
The singer, binds a chant on the lyre's chords.
It is a wing wrinkling the wave, and in it glassed:
It is the vague word moving Nature through and through,
And which the human lip shall never speak.... ”

“ If thou but move thy hand to grasp at life!
My love, the path on which we laugh with life
Pales in a doubt befogged with roads that leads not thorough;
The night is triumphing with stars, towards to-morrow!
In the night, thou sayest, shadowy terrors fall.
Be undeceived, there is no night:
There is only multiform, enormous light,
And the stars are there, for thee to be drunk withal!
THE SOURCE.
Our feet kiss where the source is glistening
[Pg 127] In the glad gloaming softening the trees.
Its waters murmur mysteries to the breeze,
And we in ravishment are listening. ”

“ And on my lips held out in vain,
Like a drop hung on the rim
Of passion's cup filled full for him,
Is trembling still a kiss I gave not back again.
Far, far away, upon the bloody plain,
(O! in the wind the wailing wild of pain!)
Perchance he fell and now he dies,—or some
Woman has with her love his heart o'ercome,
Some woman's eyes have robbed my happiness ...
With pain and love my heart is all forlorn ”

“ And now the dawn is on our pillow—hide
Your eyes—I shiver—they are haggard, wide!
SEA-SCAPE.
Under basaltic porticoes of calm sea-caves,
Heavy with alga and the moss of fucus gold,
In the occult, slow shaking of sea-waves,
Among the alga in proud blooms unfold
[Pg 33] The cups of pride of silent, slender gladioles....
The mystery wherein dies the rhythm of the waves
In gleams of kisses long and calm unrolls,
And the red coral whereon writhes the alga cold
Stretches out arms that bleed with calm flowers, and beholds
Its gleams reflected in the rest of waves. ”

“ The whole universe at the present moment is overheated; it is straining in throes of endeavour; our great towns are nothing but centres of multiplied energy; their machines are the expression of forces tamed and organized; their innumerable crowds are joined together in harmonious action. Thus to Verhaeren all things appear full of beauty. He loves our epoch because it does not disperse effort, but condenses it, because it is not scattered, but concentrated for action. All that has will, and an aim in view, man, machine, crowd, town, capital ”

“ Spider of the eve, good hope,—
Smoke ye roofs, and tables swell
With meats to mouths delectable;
And while the kitchen smoke upcurls,
Kiss and kiss, you boys and girls!
Night, the women, where they sit,
Can no longer see to knit;
Now, like loving fingers linking,
Work is done and sleep is blinking,
As balm on pious spirits drips,
All tearful eyes, all praying lips,
And straw to beasts, to mankind beds
Of solace for their weary heads.
Good-night! and men and women cross
Arms on your souls, or hearts that toss. ”

“ Thy mercy, and thy beauty, and thy youth
Eternal, and I love thee without ruth,
[Pg 7] Whom Sappho the divine and Virgil wooed.
I have all odours to perfume thee here,
And dyes for mouth and eyes, and I will make
Thy looks more luminous, and deep, and clear
Than the stainless azure bathing in this lake.
Come with thy too red lips and painted eyes!
My senses wait for thee in these bright bowers,
Where they are flowering with the soul of flowers,
O mother of fables and of lyric lies,
O courtesan! ”

“ In golden mist Dream in a mantle spun
Of purple, skimming foam with idle fingers
From silent gold rained by a teeming sun.
Broken the proud masts, and the waves are churning!
Steer to extinguished ports the vessel's prow:
No lighthouse stretches its immensely burning
Arm to the great stars—dead the fires are now.
Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten,
Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick;
Life and its days identic they have eaten,
Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.
With nails of wood they beat hot foreheads. Cages
Of bones for fevers are their bodies. ”

“ The accepted ideal of beauty is Grecian; but to Verhaeren the beauty of a thing is not in its outward form, but in the idea that moves it. In Greece the athlete was beautiful; but strength to-day is in the nerves; to-day we see more beauty in a face moulded by mind than in the thews of a discus-thrower. Smoke is beautiful in the pictures of Whistler and Monet; the toil of [Pg xxiii] grimy workmen is sublime in the sculpture of Constantin Meunier. [9] For Verhaeren, as Stefan Zweig says, "a thing is the more beautiful the more finality, will, power, energy it contains. ”

“ This waltz, it rolls with a voluptuous rhythm, in harmony with the rhythm of the Girl, like convoluted masses, musically vaporous and very heavy, volutas without end and curve on curve. They dance, their curves leave traces of caresses in the air, their undulations are a most lascivious music. She? she is very tired, she has no strength as on her cavalier she leans! ”

“ It is as light as a breeze, and like a deep river that shows its pebbles. He has in preparation a book of verse, La Flamme Immortelle, which will be a magnificent realization of his doctrine of Aspiration. Verhaeren interprets the outer world, Mockel the inner world as reflected in the outer world: for existence is double, form and shadow. Mockel has written, too, a child's story-book, Contes pour les enfants d'hier [13] which should not be given to children.
Paul Gérardy is a well-known German poet as well as a French one. ”

“ His breast that breathed it in was Beauty's source;
He knew no law that dared call Beauty coarse;
Sunrise and sunset, springs with mosses grassed,
And the green bough that brushed him as he passed,
Thrilled to his deep soul through his flesh, and were
The kiss of things that love makes lovelier. ”

“ Is infinitely heavy, tired, and ill.
Its arms, complaining arms, in the dawn's pink
Rose, rose and fell; and in this o'ercast eve,
And deadened nature's silence, still they heave
Themselves aloft, and weary till they sink.
Winter's sick day lies on the fields to sleep;
The clouds are tired of sombre journeyings ”

“ Their eyes, their lips like withered parchment pages.
[Pg 157] A bitter sand beneath their teeth they grind.
Now in their extinct souls a longing blazes
To sail, and in a new world live again,
Whose sunset like a smoking tripod raises
The God of shade and ebony in its brain;
In a far land of tempests raging madly,
In lands of fury hoarse and livid dreams,
Where man can drown, ferociously and gladly,
His soul and all his heart in fiery streams.
They are the tragic sick sharp with diseases;
Haggard and lone they watch the town fires fade ”

“ Come from the neighbouring town, who try, by God!
To lick the village girls too greedily,
And gorge a plate of beef that is not theirs.
Savings are squandered—for the girls must dance,
And every chap must treat his mate, until
The bottles strew the floor in ugly heaps.
The proudest of their strength drain huge beer-mugs,
Their faces fire-plated, darting fright,
Horrid with bloodshot eyes and clammy mouth,
In the dark rumbling revels kindle suns.
The orgy grows. A stinking urine foams
In a white froth along the causey chinks.
Like slaughtered beasts are reeling topers floored. ”

“ And in the east eve clothes with azure sheen
The slender uplands with their billowing chain,
Whose silhouettes shut in the distant plain;
And on their tops their cloak of forests gleams
Through the thin veil of mist that o'er them streams.
And all is vague, the ideal form of things
Shimmers divine in deep imaginings,
Gladdening the eye with grace ineffable;
Seeing them, in the enchanted world we dwell
[Pg 134] Of soulless, happy beings who possess
The calm we cry for of forgetfulness,
We who desire in desolate hearts that pine,
This sovereign gift of peace that makes divine ”

“ The God in every human heart, above,
Unfolds, expands, and his own being sees
In those who sometimes fell upon their knees
To worship sacred grief and humble love.
Up yonder—living peace is burning bright,
And shedding on these lands, down evening's slope
A bliss that kindles, like the brands of hope,
In the air's ash the great stars of the night. ”

“ Under thy feet a dawn that pales the day's;
And poets, mad with incense and with roses,
Laud thee with chants of glory, love, and praise.
Sweet being, grant to us thy sweetest blisses!
We drag ourselves under thy conquering feet,
While, in a downy drunkenness, thy kisses
Gather our last and loveliest heart's beat. ”

“ And his lithe fingers spread her streaming tresses
O'er the long ardour of their first caresses.
Stretched by the cool of fountains both were lying,
Seen of their passion-gleaming eyes alone.
And Adam felt a sudden thought unknown
[Pg 197] Well in his heart to her fast heart replying.
Eve's body hid profound retreats as sweet
As moss that by the noon's cool breeze is brushed;
Gladly came sheaves undone to be their seat,
Gladly the grass was by their loving crushed. ”

“ But the forgotten chandelier, whose grandiose soul
Unto the eyes of beauty dedicates
Its glorious sheaf of fires without a goal,
In halls deserted charms the solitude
That nascent morning sheds his pure breeze o'er-
And the dawn weaves afar its threads of light. ”