So, too, a tree becomes to him the image of the eternal renewal of strength, of resistance to the hardness of winter and of fate, of the will to new beauty in the spring. A mountain no longer appears to him as a chance raising of the landscape, but a great and mighty thing in whose keeps secrets lie, ores, and the source of springs, from whose summit, however, our eyes can sweep the world. The forest interprets itself to him as the labyrinth of a thousand paths, and as the many-voiced anthem of life: everything in nature becomes a freshening and a vivifying of this vitality. _An absolute transmutation of values has taken place from the time that he has comprehended things as parts of the world's entity, and as themselves an entity_. Travel, formerly a flight from reality, now becomes to him the opening out of new distances, of new possibilities; dream appears to him no longer as an illusion, but as the capacity of intensifying the real from its present to a future state. Europe is no longer to him a group of nations, a geographical idea, but the great symbol of conquest, money, gold, he no longer regards contemptuously as a materialising of life, but as a new spur for new ambition. And the sea, which in every succeeding work of his sings its unquiet rhythm, is no longer the murderous power that eats into the land, but the holy tide, the symbol of constant strength in eternal unrest; it is to him 'la mer nue et pure, comme une idée.'[3] Since everything coheres, he feels related to all in a touching brotherhood with things; he no longer feels the presence of things, he loves them like a piece of himself; he feels the sea physically in himself Ma peau, mes mains et mes cheveux Sentent la mer Et sa couleur est dans mes yeux.[4] And so, just as his vital feeling is renewed every time he comes into contact with the waves, he believes in a physical resurrection of the body out of the sea, believes that his rising from the water is a _nouveau moment de conscience_. Verhaeren has returned to the great cohesion: in Nature and in man there is no longer for him any phenomenon which might not become a symbol for him, a symbol of the great vital instinct, to stimulate and fire his vitality. And since he now responds to all things with this one feeling, a uniform conception of the world must involuntarily result from this unity of feeling. _To the unity of enthusiasm corresponds the unity of the world, the monistic feeling_. Just as he himself derives nothing but an intensification and exaltation of his feelings from all things, nothing but the very sensation of life, all phenomena and activities must be a synthesis, all forces must flow into one single force as rivers flow into the ocean, all laws must merge in one single law Toute la vie, avec ses lois, avec ses formes, --Multiples doigts noueux de quelque main énorme-- S'entr'ouvre et se referme en un poing: l'unité.[5]