It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings. Emile Verhaeren was born in 1855, of well-to-do retired parents. He lived in the country, but in Belgium the country is close to the towns, and the boy saw the river with the great ships, the factories and the busy artisans, a teeming life, stimulating to the imagination. He was educated in a Jesuit school, where they hoped to make a priest of him, but did not succeed. He studied law, and led a wild, freakish youth. He had been writing verses since childhood, Latin verses, and then the classical French Alexandrines, under the spell of Victor Hugo. Then came Zola, and young Verhaeren horrified his parents and friends by a volume of poetry portraying the violent and brutal facts of Flemish life. They are a gross and drunken people--we see them in the paintings of Rubens; and it was a time when young poets were in revolt against false idealism, and wanted to deal with reality, the more crude and hideous the better. From excess of animalism the Belgian people revolt to the other extreme, asceticism; so the country is full of monks, gloomy and sober, living apart and contemplating the past with holy awe. Verhaeren wrote a second book, in which he portrayed strange types of these devotees. But he was content to admire them; he did not join them. The poet exists by virtue of the fact that he is more sensitive than the average man; life hits him harder blows, and he flies from one extreme to the other. Modern science took from Verhaeren his Catholic faith, and there followed a period of pessimism, a terrible psychic crisis. Like Dostoievski and Strindberg, he came close to the border-line of insanity and suicide. But his restless mind would not give up to any suffering; he was thrilled even by the adventure of pain; he loved life, even though it held for him only the vision of death. All things are themes for art; so he wrote a book of nightmares, a pilgrimage of neurasthenia. The sick poet had fled from the noisy and brutal world; he found his deliverance by coming back to it. Redemption lay in loving and understanding mankind in its manifold new activities. Those things which the poets generally affect to despise Verhaeren now took up with ecstasy: industrialism, machinery, the roar of cities, the manifold activities of crowds, in all these things he discovered a new power, promising an infinitude of beauty.