Oh! vivre et vivre et se sentir meilleur À mesure que bout plus fervemment le cœur; Vivre plus clair, dès qu'on marche en conquête; Vivre plus haut encor, dès que le sort s'entête À dessécher la force et l'audace des bras.[6] And so strong must this restless enthusiasm grow, this incessant enthusiasm for things, that the height of the ascent suddenly surprises one with a rapt feeling of dizziness. The lyrical commandment of the highest ecstasy is here an ethical standard: Il faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse, Être ton propre étonnement.[7] In this idea of restless enthusiasm, the principles of which have also been expounded by Verhaeren in his essay _Cosmic Enthusiasm_ (_Insel-Almanach,_ 1913), he has established a poetic equivalent to his other great impulse of humanity, set an ethical ideal by the side of the metaphysical ideal. For if of old the yearning for knowledge, that superb struggle for the conquest of the unknown, was the only thing that placed man in an eternally living relationship to the new things, what is possibly a still more valuable instinct is discovered in this incessantly intensified ecstatic admiration. Admiring is more than estimating and knowing. To surrender oneself in love to all things is higher than the curiosity to know everything. 'Tout affronter vaut mieux que tout comprendre.'[8] For in all knowledge there is still a residue of selfishness, of the pride of personal acquisition, while admiration of things contains nothing but humility--that great humility, however, which is an infinite enrichment of life, because it signifies a dissolution in the all. Whereas knowledge is brought to a sudden standstill before many things and finds the road blocked with darkness, in admiration, in ecstasy, there is no limit set to the ego. _Though many values lock themselves up from knowledge, none denies itself wholly to admiration_. Even the smallest thing becomes great when it is penetrated with love, and the greater we let things grow--the more we enrich the substance of our own life--the more infinite we make our ego. It is the highest ethical task of a great man to find the highest value in every phenomenon, and to free this value from the thick and often stifling rind of antipathy and strangeness. Not to let oneself be repelled by resistance is the perfection of a noble enthusiasm. If anything whatsoever is void of beauty, it will have a power which by its energy expresses beauty. If anything seems strange and ugly in the traditional sense, it will set the wonderful task of finding out the new sense in which it is beautiful. _And to have found this new beauty in the new things was the active greatness of the poetic work, the greatness which was unconscious and now becomes conscious, which was knowledge and now becomes law_. While all others considered our great cities frightful and ugly, Verhaeren praised their magnificence; while