Soyez remerciés, mes yeux, D'être restés si clairs, sous mon front déjà vieux, Pour voir au loin bouger et vibrer la lumière; Et vous, mes mains, de tressaillir dans le soleil; Et vous, mes doigts, de vous dorer aux fruits vermeils Pendus au long du mur, près des roses trémières. Soyez remercié, mon corps, D'être ferme, rapide, et frémissant encor Au toucher des vents prompts ou des brises profondes; Et vous, mon torse clair et mes larges poumons, De respirer au long des mers ou sur les monts, L'air radieux et vif qui baigne et mord les mondes.[22] Thus, too, he now celebrates all things to which he is related--his body; the race and the ancestors to whom he owes his being; the country fields that have given him youth; the cities that have given him his vast outlook: he celebrates Europe and America, the past and the future. _And just as he feels himself to be strong and healthy, so too his feeling conceives of the whole world as healthy and great_. That is the incomparable and, probably, the unparalleled thing in Verhaeren's verses, what makes him so exceedingly dear to many as to me, that here cheerfulness, worldly pleasure, joy, and ecstasy are sensed not only intellectually as pride, but that this pleasure is felt positively _in the body_, with all the fibres of the blood, with all the muscles and nerves of the man. His stanzas are really, as Bazalgette so beautifully says, 'une décharge d'électricité humaine,'[23] a discharge of human, of physical electricity. Joy here becomes a physical excess, an intoxication, a superabundance without parallel: Nous apportons, ivres du monde et de nous-mêmes, Des cœurs d'hommes nouveaux dans le vieil univers.[24] There is now no disharmony between the individual poems; they are one single bubbling up of enthusiasm, 'un enivrement de soi-même'; over the many convulsive, quivering, irregular ecstasies of old now flames the ecstasy of the whole feeling of life. This ecstasy stands in our days like a figure proud, strong, and erect, exultingly flourishing the torch of passion aloft to greet the future, 'vers la joie'!