Lyric exaltation now arches the dream of its laws over reality. But it is no longer the mere dream of a youth in expectancy of life--the anæmic, vague, dark, restless dream--but a man's longing to get behind life and follow it to its earthly limit. It is a Utopia enhancing realities beyond themselves; it is the dream of Godhead in things. In the whole world Verhaeren sees a cosmic effort. 'Le monde est trépidant de trains et de navires.'[1] The whole world is excited with human activity and effort; manifestations of the feeling of life flame everywhere; everywhere humanity is fighting for something invisible and perhaps unattainable. But whereas of old the poet estimated the value of every separate energy, now he comprehends all energies as one uniform manifestation, recognises behind the unconscious activity of the individual the sway of something greater--the bourne of all humanity. All who work in the material of the temporal only symbolise eternal forces--intoxication, energy, conquest, joy, error, expectation, Utopia. And it is to these forces, or rather to these forms of the force at the root of all things, that his poems are addressed. In _Les Visages de la Vie_ he seeks to describe yearning in all its forms and aims; its distribution in human labour, its restlessness, its vigour, and, above all, its beauty. But not only human manifestations now appear to him in a closer cohesion, the synthesis of realism and metaphysics now makes his relationship to elementary things richer and more heroic. Now, when he treats some motive he had already treated in the first books, and these poems of the first and last periods are compared, it is with astonishment and admiration that you trace the silent growth of these last years. I will mention one example. He had already sung a song to the wind. But the wind at that time was to him the evil storm that tousles cottages, shakes chimneys, forces its way into rooms, rages across country, and brings the winter. It was a senseless power, beautiful in its senselessness, but aimless, an incomprehensible element, a detached phenomenon of Nature. Now, however, the poet in his maturity looks upon it as the wanderer over the undying world, one that has seen all countries, that drives ships over seas, that has sated itself with the perfume of strange flowers and brings it from far away, that penetrates our chest like an aroma and steels and expands it. Now he loves the wind as one of the thousand things of the earth which contribute to the intensification of his vital feeling. Si j'aime, admire et chante avec folie, Le vent, * * * * * C'est qu'il grandit mon être entier et c'est qu'avant De s'infiltrer, par mes poumons et par mes pores, Jusques au sang dont vit mon corps, Avec sa force rude ou sa douceur profonde, Immensément, il a étreint le monde.[2]