In an essay on Verhaeren recently printed, I called attention to the fact that while Verhaeren wrote of the Flemings with enthusiasm, and with repulsively careful attention to detail, he did not write of them with sympathy. He does not join in the revels about which he writes; he is interested in his loud purple-faced peasants, but with his interest is mingled a certain scorn. Thomas Braun, on the other hand, is thoroughly in sympathy with the life of which he writes; the reader feels that such a poem as _The Benediction of Wine_, for example, was written by a man who is artist enough to share actually in the strong simple piety of the keeper of the vineyard. The quaintness of Thomas Braun’s poems, which is emphasized by the woodcuts made to accompany them by his brother who is a Benedictine monk, is not an affectation, it is a quality proper to the work of a man who, like Wordsworth, sees beauty chiefly in simplicity. Like Coventry Patmore, he has “divine frivolity,” he is acquainted with the mirth of the Saints. In his own beautiful words, he knows how to play in the straw with the Child of Bethlehem. Georges Ramaekers is a poet whose verse is for the most part too obscure to lend itself readily to translation. He will write a poem, for example, on mushrooms, and the reader will think after several minutes that he is being told merely about the common fungi. Then it comes to him that it is the Tree of Life that these maleficent growths are attacking; then they cover the columns of the Church and actually reach the Host Itself. The poem is, it seems, a denunciation of certain heresies, or of sloth, indifference, and other spiritual evils, but its meaning cannot adequately be given in an English translation. Here is a similar poem, which, in Mr. Bithell’s translation, shows Georges Ramaeker’s symbolic method at its best and clearest. THE THISTLE Rooted on herbless peaks, where its erect And prickly leaves, austerely cold and dumb, Hold the slow, scaly serpent in respect, The Gothic thistle, while the insects’ hum Sounds far off, rears above the rock it scorns Its rigid virtue for the Heavens to see. The towering boulders guard it. And the bee Makes honey from the blossoms on its thorns. Victor Kinon, like that very different poet, Albert Giraud, the chief Belgian disciple of Baudelaire, is of Walloon descent. Mr. Bithell calls this poet a “fervent Roman Catholic,” but the poems which he has selected for translation are entirely secular in theme and treatment. They show, however, that their author is free from the vices of extreme realism and hysteria, which afflict many of his contemporaries. Sometimes it is fair to judge a poet’s whole attitude toward life from his love poems. When decadence and feverish eroticism are in fashion, it is refreshing to come upon a poet sane enough to write so honest and delicate a poem as this of Victor Kinon. HIDING FROM THE WORLD