And that 'picchia, picchia,' that rhythm of Carducci's, that beat of the bronze hammer of toil, rings in the measure of his verses. All his poems have been toiled for, fought for; they are a trophy, a meed of victory; nothing is a lucky gift. Verhaeren's manuscripts look like a battlefield. For he is not a poet who, in Goethe's sense, composes poems for particular occasions; he is never overpowered by a sudden chance idea: he transforms a problem of life, an actuality, or an intellectual phase into a lyric mood. After he has molten the poetic idea in his passion to a white heat, he hammers it into a poem by his rhythm. His works are complexes: individual ideas attract him; he sets a hedge round their poetical field, ploughs it, scatters the seed in it, and never returns to the scene. What he has once achieved has no longer any attraction for him. To him poetry is always a fight, always work, always a plan. The layman who would fain look upon a lyric poem as a gift fallen from heaven will perhaps have no liking for this conscious method; an artist, on the other hand, will recognise in it the strength of a wise restraint, concentration on one aim, the will to compose not a lyric poem but a lyric work. A poetic work like that of Verhaeren, the work of a life, is not created by chance feeling alone, and not by enthusiasm. Such a work of art has, like a drama, its intellectual laws, the conquering and distributing powers of the intelligence, instinct, and above all that unifying will which suffers no dead points, no gaps, no stains in the work. And it is from such a vast lyric will that this work has arisen. Verhaeren is no favoured child of fortune, dowered with art in his cradle; his blood is heavy, Teutonic blood; and, fortunately, that ease and suppleness of the artisan which in all departments of labour produces a ready mediocrity was as much wanting in him as all physical skill. Verhaeren's poetic work, his form, his rhythm, his idea, his philosophy, his architectonics, all this is something he has acquired by labour, something he has painfully produced by passion and an obstinate will; but for that very reason it is something organic. For Verhaeren is one of those who learn slowly, persistently, and surely, only from their own experience and never from others, but who never forget and lose what they have once acquired; one of those who grow as the things of Nature do, as trees grow into their strength ring by ring, and rise year by year higher above the earth to gaze farther and farther out beyond the horizons and nearer and nearer into the heavens.