_Sur la route muette et régulière, Les yeux fixés vers la lumière Qui frôle en se couchant les clos et les maisons, Le blanc cordier visionnaire, Du fond du soir auréolaire, Attire à lui les horizons_; and, finally, the many-tentacled towns, drawing to themselves all the strength and sap of the earth: "Les Spectacles, La Bourse, Le Bazar," the monstrous and material soul of towns. Contrast these poems with those early poems, so brutal, so Flemish, if you would see at a glance all the difference between the naturalistic and the symbolistic treatment. The subject-matter is the same; the same eye sees; there are the same _vers bâtis comme une estrade Pour la danse des mots et leurs belles parades._ But at first there is merely an eye that sees, and that takes the visible world at its own valuation of itself. Later on, things are seen but to be readjusted, to be set into relation with other, invisible realities, of which they are no more than the wavering and tortured reflection. And with this poet, in his later manner, everything becomes symbol; the shop, the theater, the bank, no less than the old rope-maker weaving the horizons together. _Sur la Ville, d'où les affres flamboient, Règnent, sans qu'on les voie, Mais évidentes, les idées_: as he can write, on the last page of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, which points directly to _Les Aubes_, in which a sort of deliverance through ideas is worked out. Verhaeren's second play, _Le Cloitre_, is much finer in every way than his first, _Les Aubes_, but it does not convince us that he is a dramatist, in the strict sense of the word. The only French poet of the present day who has really vivid energy, his energy is too feverish, too spasmodic, too little under the control of a shaping intellect, to be of precisely the quality required for the drama. The people of these brief and fiery scenes are like little broken bits of the savage forces of the world, working out their passionate issues under the quiet roofs of the cloister. All their words are cries, coming out of a half-delirious suffering; and these cries echo about the stage in an almost monotonous conflict. It seems to us that the form which suits Verhaeren best is the form which he has temporarily abandoned--a kind of fiery reverie, seen finally in his last book, _Les Visages de la Vie_, _Mon âme était anxieuse d'être elle-même Elle s'illimitait en une âme suprême Et violente, où l'univers se résumait;--_