by the impetuous stimulants of robust life; his nerves are--not dull, but healthy. They respond strongly to whatever lays hold of them strongly. If the other poets are like supersensitive beings who are excited by every trifle and lose their self-control when really great demands are made upon them, Verhaeren is like one who is hard to irritate, but who, if he is really stung, strikes out with his fists. _And Verhaeren does not love the poetical things that come to meet one already clothed in beauty; he loves those that have first to be wrestled with and overcome. Herein lies the exceeding masculinity of his art_. No one could ever surmise, in reading a poem of Verhaeren's, that it was the work of a woman. And as a matter of fact Verhaeren has not yet found an audience among women. For he is not one who moans and begs for pity; he is no passive poet, but a fighter, one who wrestles with all strong, wild, and living things until they yield up to him their innermost beauty. And this struggle for the lyric mastery of individual sensations gradually becomes a struggle for all things, for the whole world. For Verhaeren does not wish to conceive of anything as unlyrical; does not wish to blow lyric fragments off the immense mass of reality; he wishes to sculpture it into a new shape; wishes to chisel the whole world into a lyric. And this is the secret of his lyric work; _this_ is his work, his task. Of a sudden we feel the distance between him and the majority of lyric poets. _They_ have the feelings of people who receive gifts; they regard the sensations which come fluttering towards them as so many gay butterflies, capture them, and pin them down. Verhaeren, however, is the fighter, the worker, who is constrained to conquer everything, to shape the whole world anew, to rebuild it nearer to his heart's enthusiasm. He is the lyric poet pictured by Carducci in an imperishable poem--not the idler gazing into empty space; not the gardener decking the paths that his lady's feet must tread, and gathering frail violets for her bosom. Il poeta è un grande artiere, Che al mestiere Fece i muscoli d'acciaio, Capo ha fier, collo robusto, Nudo il busto, Duro il braccio, e l'occhio gaio.