Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse, more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own. Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own image. Walt Whitman sang “these states,” and saw them as one mighty, triumphant land. Verhaeren also had a vision, he was the prophet of the United States of Europe. He had lived in all its great capitals, and knew and interpreted the forces which were bringing them together and making them one. Terrible places they are--“the octopus cities,” he calls them in the title of one of his volumes, and portrays them as gigantic tentacular monsters, sucking all the life-blood from the country. No poet has ever approached Verhaeren in the portrayal of the cruelty and loneliness and horror of these capitalist cities. You will find in “The Cry for Justice” a translation of one of these poems, the most frightful picture of prostitution ever given in verse. Verhaeren welcomed science, and proclaimed mass solidarity, the surrender of the individual to the sweep of progress. He became a prophet and preacher of what he called “cosmic enthusiasm.” He was, of course, a Socialist and revolutionist. He wrote a lyrical drama called “The Dawn,” which has been translated into English by Arthur Symonds. Here in a mixture of prose and verse he celebrates a hero who surrenders the citadel of capitalism to the masses, and gives his life in the effort to abolish class conflict and build the happy future. Verhaeren wrote other plays which have not yet been translated or produced; they do not conform to the rules of the drama for profit, for they deal with humanity and not with sex. But the new time is coming--and here is one of its prophets. CHAPTER XCIV THE INSPIRED PARRAKEET I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is a _god_!” he exclaimed. Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford, but respectability failed to “take” with him.