And, wonderful to say, here too the circle is closed, here too the end of Verhaeren's know-ledge--as we have seen in so many things with him--is a return to the beginning. Here too there is nothing save an inherited instinct which has become a rapt consciousness. His first book and his last ones, _Les Flamandes_, as well as _Les Rythmes Souverains_ and _Les Blés Mouvants,_ celebrate life--the first, it is true, only life's outer form, the dull enjoyment of the senses: the last books, however, celebrate the conscious, intensified, sublimated feeling of life. Verhaeren's whole evolution--here again in harmony with the great poets of our nation, with Nietzsche and Dehmel--is not suppression, but a conscious intensification of original instincts. Just as in--his first books he described his native province, and again in his last, save that now the land is bounded by the horizons of the whole world, here again the feeling of life returns as the sense of life, but it is now enriched with all the knowledge he has acquired, with all the victories he has won. Passion, which was in his first book a chaotic revolt, has here become a law; the instinctive sensation of pleasure in health has been transformed into a deliberate and conscious pleasure in life and in all its forms. Now again Verhaeren feels the great pride of a strong man: Je marche avec l'orgueil d'aimer l'air et la terre, D'être immense et d'être fou Et de mêler le monde et tout À cet enivrement de vie élémentaire.[20] The health of the strong race he once celebrated in the lads and lasses of his native province, he now sings in himself. And so strong is the identity between his ego and the world that he, desiring to sing the beauty of the whole world, is now compelled to include himself and to celebrate his own body. He who of old hated his body as a prison out of which he could not escape to flee from himself, he who wished to 'spit himself out,' now fits into the hymn of the world a stanza in celebration of his own ego: J'aime mes yeux, mes bras, mes mains, ma chair, mon torse Et mes cheveux amples et blonds, Et je voudrais, par mes poumons, Boire l'espace entier pour en gonfler ma force.[21] The feeling of identity has given him absolute identity in regard to himself. It is not in vanity that he celebrates himself, but in gratitude. For the body is to him only a means of sensing the beauty, power, and beneficence of the world, is to him a wonderful possibility of enjoying things by strength in strong passion. And wonderful are these thanks of an ageing man to his eyes and ears and chest for still permitting him to feel earth's beauty with all the fervour of old: