Paying no heed to the seductions of love, the strong men, the really great, ascend to the skies, to spiritual knowledge; they gather the fruits of stars and comets; and then, only then, when they are returning, tired by their lonely wandering, do they observe women, and lay down in their hands the knowledge of the great worlds. _Not in the beginning, in the vehement days of youth, but only when manhood is established, only in the time of inner maturity, can woman become a great experience for Verhaeren_. He must first of all have acquired a firm footing, must know his place in the world, before he can yield himself up to love. It is strange that the sonnet I have quoted should have been written in youth, because, like a presentiment, it relates the fate of his own life in advance. For the images of women never stopped his path nor turned him aside from it; love, if I may say so, only occupied his senses and never absorbed his soul. Not till later, till the years when the crisis was undermining his body, when his nerves were giving way under the terrible strain, when solitude reared itself before his face like an inseparable foe, did a woman enter his life. Then, and not till then, did love and marriage--the personal symbol of eternal, exterior order--give him inward rest. And to this woman the only love-poems he ever wrote are addressed. In Verhaeren's work, which is graded like a trilogy--in this symphony that is often brutal--there is a quiet, soft andante, a trilogy in the trilogy, one of love. From the point of view of art, these three books, _Les Heures Claires, Les Heures d'Après-midi,_ and _Les Heures du Soir_, are not less in value than his great works, but they are more gentle. From this savage and passionate man one might have expected visionary, seething ecstasies, a tempestuous discharge of erotic feeling; but these books are a wonderful disappointment. They are not spoken to the crowd, but to one woman only, and for that reason they are not spoken loudly, but with a voice subdued. Religious consciousness--for with Verhaeren all that is poetic is religious in a new sense--finds a new form here. _Here Verhaeren does not preach, he prays_. These little pages are the privacy of his personal life, the confession of a passion which is great indeed, but veiled as it were with a delicate shame. 'Oh! la tendresse des forts!' is Bazalgette's inspired comment. And in truth, it is impossible to imagine anything more touching than the sight of this mighty fighter here lowering his resonant voice to the soft breathings of devotion. These verses are quite simple, spoken low, as though wild and too passionate words might imperil so noble a feeling, as though a strong man, a brutal man, who is afraid of hurting a delicate woman with a touch accustomed to bronze, should lay his hand on hers only softly, most cautiously.