as he says in one of the poems of that book; and in all these poems, "La Foule, L'Ivresse, La Joie," and the rest, we see the poet sending his soul into the universe and becoming a vehement voice for all that he finds most passionate in it. It is, in its way, dramatizing of emotion, but, if one may say so, an abstract dramatizing. It is the crowd, not Dom Balthazar; joy itself, not some joyous human being for which he finds words; and his merits and his defects make him a better spokesman for disembodied than for embodied souls. Since the early period of Flemish realism he has been, while making his language more and more pictorial, making his interests more and more internal. He no longer paints landscapes, but the scenery of the soul, and in the same vast and colored images. He magnifies sensation until it becomes a sort of hallucination of which he seems always to be the victim. Now all this is so very personal, so clearly the vision of a not quite healthy temperament, that his neurotic monks in the cloister, with their heated and vehement speech, seem more like repetitions of a single type than individual characters. But he has certainly come nearer to dramatic characterization than in the _Shadowy Dawn_, and he has founded his play on a more emotionally human basis; on a basis, it would seem, partly suggested by the story which Browning tells in _Halbert and Hob._ And, taken as a poem, it is full of vigorous, imaginative writing, in which the religious passion finds eloquent speech. And, after all, is not this one of the most interesting, and not even one of the least successful, attempts at what a more extravagant imitator has lately called _La tragédie intérieure?_ The actual tendency of art is certainly toward an abandonment of the heroic and amusing adventures which constituted so much of the art of the past, and a concentration upon whatever can be surmised of that soul which these adventures must doubtless have left so singularly indifferent. Ibsen has shown us destiny quietly at work in suburban drawing-rooms, among people who have rarely anything interesting to say, but whose least word becomes interesting because it is seen to knit one more mesh in the net of destiny. Maeterlinck has gone further, and shown us soul talking with soul, at first under almost pseudo-romantic disguises, among Leonardo landscapes, then more and more simply, as people who have no longer lost their crowns in a pool, but who, in Aglavaine and Selysette, might be any of our acquaintances, if we can imagine our acquaintances under a startling and revealing flash of light. Verhaeren falls into the movement, trying to give a more lyrical form to this new kind of drama, trying to give it a narrower and fiercer intensity. What he has so far achieved is a melodrama of the spirit, in which there is poetry, but also rhetoric. Will he finally be able to find for himself a form in which the "inner tragedy" can be