How beautiful these poems are! When you read them, they take you softly by the hand and lead you into a garden. Here you see no more the murky horizon of the city, the workshops; you do not hear the din of streets, nor that resonant rhythm that raged along in cataract on cataract; you hear a gentle music as of a playing fountain. Passion does not project you here to the great ecstasies of humanity and the sky; it has no will to make you wild and fervid; it soothes you to tenderness and devotion. The strident voice has grown soft, these colours are of transparent crystal, this song seems to express the vast silence from which those great passions drew their force. But these poems are not artificial. They too are of one woof with the elements of Nature; but not with the great, wild, and heart-moving world, not with the fiery sky, not with thunder and tempests: it is only a garden that you surmise here, a peaceful cottage, with birds singing about it, where there are sweet-scented flowers and silence hanging between trees in blossom. The adventures are insignificant in feature. You breathe the poetry of everyday life, but not that of open and wildly surging roads--only the poetry of closed walls, softly spoken dialogues about little things, the tenderest secrets of home. These are the experiences of personal existence, this is the ordinary day between the great ecstasies. The lamp burns softly in the room, the silence is full of wonderful tenderness: Et l'on se dit les simples choses: Le fruit qu'on a cueilli dans le jardin; La fleur qui s'est ouverte, D'entre les mousses vertes, Et la pensée éclose, en des émois soudains, Au souvenir d'un mot de tendresse fanée Surpris au fond d'un vieux tiroir, Sur un billet de l'autre année.[3] Here you have the deepest feeling, thanks and devotion, not in ecstasy to God and the world, but addressed to one single being. For Verhaeren is one who is ever receiving gifts, who always feels that he is being heaped with favours, who has always to give thanks for life and all its miracles. Without measure, with that zest, with that incessantly renewed joy which is the deepest secret of his art, he here again and again expresses love and gratitude. As Orpheus rises to Euridice from the nether world, here the sick lover ascends to the lady who has saved him from the dark. And again and again he thanks her for the good hours of quietness; again and again he reminds her of their first meeting, of the sunny happiness of these present days: Avec mes sens, avec mon cœur et mon cerveau, Avec mon être entier tendu comme un flambeau Vers ta bonté et vers ta charité, Je t'aime et te louange et je te remercie D'être venue, un jour, si simplement, Par les chemins du dévouement, Prendre en tes mains bienfaisantes, ma vie.[4] These verses are genuflexions, folded hands, love that by humility becomes religion.