Avec des écumes de plumes gers lovingly, in some of the most Au chanfrein tors de son cheval sans mors exquisite lines he has penned, over the Descend. Il sait de quels lointains je viens, Sur de la honte et la lie! J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui Le Saint Georges cuirassé clair Devant sa vision altière Et lui s'en est allé, m'imposant la vaillance Et sur le front la marque en croix d'or de sa lance, Droit vers son Dieu, avec mon cœur. The same spirit of freshly awakened hope pervades the subsequent poems of the volume. The whole landscape is changed, or rather it is gazed upon with changed eyes. The plain is bathed in sunshine; the north winds have fled, and the poet meets in his wanderings with tender, saint-like figures, bluerobed Mercy and white Virtue and pensive Love, who talk to him with De belles voix douces et consolantes Comme leurs robes et leures mantes Long-tombantes et longuement calmantes. Lines, illustrative of the hypnotically soothing effect of harmoniously repeated sounds, an effect in the use of which both Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are past masters. In another poem the poet meets with his Angel Guardian, pure and calm, the hem of her robe embroidered with the three theological virtues, seated in the midst of luxurious blossoms. He lin sunny garden landscape, gay with bright flowers and green sward and butterflies, symbolical of the new life that has dawned in his soul. Thus it becomes evident that Verhaeren is tentatively launching his skiff on the deep waters of mysticism. He has come to see that the relations of man's conscience to life are all important, and that the outward and visible manifestations of nature are mainly beautiful and interesting, in so far as they give evidence of their inward and spritual meaning. For the mystic the realities of life fade into the background; the spiritualities are omnipresent. Verhaeren's mysticism, however, is neither theological nor ascetic, nor, it must be confessed, very profound; rather it is the graceful sympathetic mysticism of the dreamer, whose tender susceptibilities are being continually jarred by the material brutalities of life, and who turns for consolation to joys and appreciations of which the uninitiated can have no perception. There is no conversion-to use the hackneyed phrasein all this; it is the natural development of the poetic temperament purged by a period of suffering. Yet "Les Apparus dans mes Chemins" undoubtedly marks a turning-point in the poet's life. Henceforth he gazes outwards rather than inwards, and his genius takes a wider flight. The work on which Verhaeren is at present engaged is a Trilogy, of which the first two volumes, "Les Campagnes Hallucinées" and "Les Villes Tentaculaires" have already appeared, and the third, "Les Aubes," is in course of preparation. It is his longest and most ambitious effort, written throughout in a tragic and prophetic spirit, and undoubtedly contains much admirable and striking work. But for my own part, with all due respect for the Trilogy, I prefer Verhaeren in his lighter moods, moods which have already produced “L'Almanach" and "Les Villages Illusoires," and which, I rejoice to hear, will shortly give birth to a volume with the promising title of "Heures Claires." Yet even at his gayest there is a pro- Such, in very inadequate outline, is found streak of melancholy running through everything that falls from his pen. A distinctive note of many of his later poems is the sense of death by which they are pervaded, of death and of madness which lurk in the darkening landscape, and to which, sooner or later, man falls a helpless prey. Death is ever relentless, merciless, omnipotent; nothing can avail against her, not even La Sainte Vierge, to whom the peasants turn in their despair. It is here that Verhaeren and Maeterlinck approximate most nearly to one another. To both the spirit world has become the real, the dominant world, and man in his material form, in his outward and visible being, is the mere sport of the infinite and immeasurable forces which surround him, which he feels dominating his life, but of whose personality he remains necessarily in ignorance. Free-will becomes almost blotted out from life; we are all at the mercy of these dimly perceived influences, and more often the evil triumphs over the good. Yet there is beauty in life to save us from despair-abstract beauty, invincible in her strength and soul-satisfy. ing in her manifestations. Beauty is nature undefiled by man, the virgin plain which the "Ville Tentaculaire," or modern industrialism, is eating up. Man's works for the most part are evil: he is fallen humanity, with material instincts, a lust for gold and animal passions. Yet he is possessed of a soul, and those who will may commune with nature and so rise to some measure of appreciation of the higher mystical life. Verhaeren points no moral in all thisthe poet is not concerned with results he simply paints life as it appears to him, and would disclaim responsibility for the sadness of his pictures. For himself he finds his happiness in the conviction that a benign spirit beyond the grave watches over and directs his life. He feels her hand in his hand, her robes brush past him, her eyes gaze into his, and the forlorn hopelessness of his former life is transformed into an energizing passion of love and gratitude. the poet's later attitude towards life. To this period belongs "Les Villages Illusoires" which has always seemed to me at once the most beautiful and the most powerful of all his works, most full of true poetical feeling and most perfect in form. But I advance the opinion not without diffidence, for I find that it is not shared by his admirers among "les Jeunes" either of Paris or of Brussels, to whom he appeals most strongly as the poet of revolt, in blind conflict with fate. Such a mood is, however, as a rule, somewhat antagonistic to the English temperament, and I still venture to think that when the English public rises to an appreciation of Verhaeren, it is "Les Villages Illusoires" rather than "Les Débâcles" or the Trilogy, that will be best appreciated on this side of the Channel. In painting these illusory villages his symbolism finds its most perfect expression; with delicate art and with a wonderfully minute appreciation of the conditions of labor, he selects the humble toilers of the plains as symbols of the primary truths of life. Many of the poems are protests against selfish, narrow, and materialistic aims. He writes with bitter scorn of the carpenter who settles all the problems of life by rule and line, and can realize nothing outside his own petty mathematical calculations. "Les Pêcheurs" gives a weird picture, full of suggestive teaching, of the fishermen fishing with bent backs in stagnant waters through the misty night. So absorbed are they, each in his own selfish labors, that, though side by side, they never see one another, or speak to one another, or help one another. Of the enthusiasts and visionaries, the idealists of this world, even though their labor be barren and their dreams impracticable, Verhaeren writes with a note of triumphant tenderness. We find it in the beautiful and pathetic poem of the ferryman rowing vainly against time and tide in answer to a distant voice from the clouds, and again in more dramatic form in the bellringer wildly tolling his bell in the tower when the church is in flames. It is one of the poet's finest word-pictures, boundless stretch of heather-grown this of the old man, a martyr to duty, the flames, "les crins rouges de l'incendie," encircling the tower until with a crash he is buried in the ruins. Here is a finely conceived incident of the conflagration:— Le vieux sonneur sonne si fort qu'il peut Comme si les flames brûlaient son Dieu. Les Corneilles et les hiboux Passent avec de longs cris fous Cognant leurs têtes aux fenêtres fermées Brulant leur vol dans la fumée Battus d'effroi, cassés d'essors plain over which hovers a silence that can be felt. Nothing has broken it since the last thunder-storm of summer. Here and there the church bells ring, here and there a wagon creaks slowly past: Mais aucun bruit n'est assez fort So overwhelming is the sense of silence, that those who fall under its spell come to regard it as a living force: Les vieux bergers que leurs cent ans disloquent, . Et tout-à-coup, parmi les houles de la Et leurs vieux chiens usés et comme en foule S'abattant morts. Most profound of all in conception, and most illustrative of the mystical optimism of the poet's later mood, is "Les Cordiers." Stepping always backwards, twisting the pale hemp in endless strands, the rope-maker seems to draw down upon himself the horizons of life, and reads the past, the present, and the future: the wild, free, passionate life of the past, crowned by "la mort folle et splendide;" the present, with its materialism, its pride of intellect, its miracles of mechanical invention replacing the miracles of faith; and the future, a double golden staircase of hope and of science leading upwards to where faith unseals the eyes of all, and all are united in a universal peace. In melodious rhythmical verse nothing, it seems to me, surpasses Verhaeren's word-pictures of the elements, giving to each its peculiar quality of mournful beauty, whether he sings of the rain:La pluie, La longue pluit avec ses ongles gris, or of "Le vent sauvage de Novembre," or of the infinite, heavy monotony of a fall of snow: La neige tombe indiscontinûment Comme une lente et longue et pauvre laine Parmi la morne et longue et pauvre plaine Froide d'amour, chaude de haine. loques Le regardent par fois dans les plaines sans bruit Sur les dunes en or que les ombres cha marrent S'asseoir immensément du côté de la nuit. Alors les eaux ont peur au pli des mares La bruyère se voile et blêmit toute, Chaque feuillée à chaque arbuste écoute Et le couchant incendiare, Tait devant lui les cris brandis de sa lumière. Of this haunting poem, as also of "La Pluie," English readers have already had an opportunity of judging in a translation of singular felicity from the pen of Miss Alma Strettell. It is much to be hoped that so accomplished a translator will feel encouraged to pursue her Verhaeren studies. The poem is further interesting as bringing the author into direct comparison with his friend and compatriot Georges Rodenbach, whose volume, "Le Règne du Silence," has had a considerable success in Paris, and whose admirers frequently place him on a level with Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. In such a judgment I cannot concur. After the broad sweep of Verhaeren's verse, and the temerity of his images, there is something essentially timid, restricted, even précieux, about Rodenbach's elegant boudoir verses, graceful and ingenius as they frequently are, and I venture to say, that in the whole of his volume on silence, there is nothing half so penetrating or convincing as Verhaeren's one exquisite rhythmical But Verhaeren's finest poem in this strain is "Le Silence," showing the poem. The leading motive of both "Les Campagnes Hallucinées" and "Les Villes Tentaculaires" is the destruction of the former by the latter. The constant inroads of the town on the country is as a nightmare to the poet's soul. He foresees that, stretching out its loathsome tentacles, the city will suck in and devour, bit by bit, the vast plain that he loves so well, and that in these later volumes he mourns over as over the body of a dead friend. "La plaine est morne et lasse et ne se défend plus," he laments in the opening poem of his latest work. In modern industrialism, with its factories, and chimneys, and railways, and crowded docks, he can see nothing but what is hideous and revolting. He passes in review, one after the other, the features of a modern town-the theatre, the bourse, the sailors' quarter-and he paints each in lurid colors, working himself up into a frenzy of eloquent denunciation, There is much that is incoherent in the volume, much, too, that is overstrained and labored, as though Verhaeren himself had wearied over his subject, and here and there he is positively grotesque, as in the line: Concerning the idiosyncrasies of Verhaeren's style, it would be easy to be captiously critical, and doubtless there is much in the form of his poems to which that august body, the French Academy, would sternly take exception. If a rhyme possesses the required sound Verhaeren does not trouble himself about spelling and terminations. He has a passion for sonorous and manysyllabled adjectives, especially those ending in "aire" and "oire," such as "dia mentaire," "myriadaire,” “ostentatoire," and, where the French language fails him, he does not hesitate to enrich her vocabulary according to his needs. So, too, he takes liberties with his syntax, and makes effective use of such phrases as "la souvent maison de ma tristesse," and "le tout-à-coup SaintGeorges." But, with all this, the fact remains that Verhaeren is a wonderful master of style. He commands a ceaseless flow of sonorous and harmonious language, a singular rich vocabulary, and an unique gift for bold and picturesque imagery. In his hands the "vers libre" becomes a marvellously flexible instrument for the use of his somewhat fantastic genius. He stands to-day in Les ales d'or et le whisky, couleur topaze, old of a high reputation, and it may well the plenitude of his gifts, on the thresh in writing of factory life. Once or twice only he melts into a gentler mood in his descriptions, clear and vivid as an outline drawing, of the statues that adorn the town-monk and soldier, apostle and bourgeois—the individuality of each indicated with exquisite perception. The long poem, "La Révolte," is a veritable tour-de-force, and brings his denunciation of la ville tentaculaire to a climax. The misery, the vice suddenly explode, and revolution sweeps all before it. At such a moment Verhaeren has all the dramatic instincts of Victor Hugo, whom he curiously resembles. The rush of the maddened people, the lust for blood, the sack of churches, the torches with tongues of flame setting fire to the buildings, oppress the reader with an irresistible sense of reality. Anarchy lives in his powerful lines; it is a dramatic moment rendered with infinite art. be that his best work lies still before him. Any attempt, therefore, to assign him a permanent place in the literary ranks of the age would be vain and premature; yet there can, I think, be no doubt that, in virtue both of the nobility of his language and the wide sweep of his imagination, he is entitled to a very high rank among contemporary poets. I should like to say that he is something more than a poet, that he is also a thinker. He appeals at once to the intellect and to the imagination; his poems bear the impress of personal suffering and personal knowledge, and they are full of suggestive thoughts on the eternal problems that arrest the attention of mankind. In a word, Emile Verhaeren is intensely human, both in his joys and sorrows, in his hopes and his despair, and it is this near sense of comradeship which evokes in the reader a strong personal sympathy for the man, in addition to the homage due down, he slept deeply, as men sleep to him as a poet. VIRGINIA M. CRAWFOrd. From Temple Bar. A FREAK OF CUPID. CHAPTER III. Courthope opened the shutters of his window to look out upon the night; they were heavy wooden shutters clasped with an iron clasp. A French window he could also open; outside that a temporary double window was fixed in the casement with light hooks at the four corners. The wind was still blustering about the lonely house, and, after examining the twilight of the snow-clad night attentively, he perceived that snow was still falling. He thought he could almost see the drifts rising higher against the outbuildings. Two large barns stood behind the house; from these he judged that the fields around were farmed. It was considerations concerning the project of his journey the next day which had made him look out, and also a restless curiosity regarding every detail of the ménage whose young mistress was at once so childlike and so queenlike. While looking out he had what seemed a curious hallucination of a dark figure standing for a moment on the top of the deep snow. As he looked more steadily the figure disappeared. All the outlines at which he looked were chaotic to the sight, because of the darkness and the drifting snow and the light, which was behind him, shimmering upon the pane. If half-a-dozen apparitions had passed in the dim and whirling atmosphere of the yards, he would have supposed that they were shadows formed by the beams of his lamp, being interrupted here and there by the eddying snow where the wind whirled it most densely. He did not close his shutters, he even left his inner window partially open, because, unac customed to a stove, he felt oppressed by its heat. When he threw himself after days among snow-fields, when a sense of entire security is the lethargic brain's lullaby. He was conscious first of a dream in which the sisters experienced some imminent danger; he heard shrieks piercing the night. He woke to feel snow and wind driving upon his face, to realize a half-waking impression that a man had passed through his room, to know that the screams of a woman's voice were a reality. As he sprang for his clothes he saw that the window was wide open, the whole frame of the outer double glass having been removed, but the screams of terror he heard were within the house. Opening the door to the dark hall he ran, guided by the sound, to the foot of the staircase which the girls had ascended, then up its long straight ascent. He took its first steps in a bound, but, as his brain became more perfectly awake, confusion of thought, wonder, a certain timidity because now the screaming had ceased, caused him to slacken his pace. He was thus hesitating in the darkness when he found himself confronted by Madge King. She stood majestic in grey woollen gown, candle in hand, and her dark eyes blazed upor him in terror, wrath and indignation. It seemed for a moment that she could not speak; some movement passed over the white sweep of her throat and the full dimpling lips, and then, "Go down!" She would have spoken to a dog with the same authority, but never with such contemptuous wrath. "Go down at once! How dare you?" Abashed, knowing not what he might have done to offend, Courthope fell back a step against the wall of the staircase. From within the room Eliz cried, "Is he there? Come in and lock the door, Madge, or he'll kill you!" The voice, sharp, high with terror, rose at the end, and burst into one of those piercing shrieks which seemed to fill the night, as the voices of some small insects have the power to make the welkin ring in response. Before Courthope could find a word tc utter, another light was thrown upor |