Earth called him back, and his native province. Poetically and humanly, his return to Belgium signifies his deliverance, the triumph of the art of his life. Like the ship that he sings in _La Guirlande des Dunes_, the ship that has crossed all the seas of the world, and, though half dashed to pieces, ever comes sailing home again to Flanders, he himself has anchored again in the harbour whence he set sail. His poetry has ended where it began. In his last work he has celebrated the Flanders he sang as a youth, no longer, however, as a provincial poet, but as a national poet. Now he has ranged the past and the future along with the present, now he has sung Flanders too, not in individual poems, but as an entity in one poem. 'Verhaeren élargit de son propre souffle l'horizon de la petite patrie, et, comme le fit Balzac de son ingrate et douce Touraine, il annexe aux plaines flamandes le beau royaume humain de son idéalité et de son art.'[1] He has returned to his own race, to the bosom of Nature, to the eternal resources of health and life. And now he lives at Caillou-qui-bique, a little hamlet in the Walloon district. Three or four houses stand there, far away from the railway, sequestered in the wood, and yet near the fields; and of these little houses the smallest, with few rooms and a quiet garden, is his. Here he leads the peaceful existence which is necessary for the growth of great work; here he holds solitary communion with Nature, undistracted by the voices of men and the hubbub of great towns; here he dreams his cosmic visions. He has the same healthy and simple food as the country people around him; he goes for early morning walks across the fields, talks to the peasants and the tradesmen of the village as though they were his equals; they tell him of their cares and petty transactions, and he listens to them with that unfeigned interest which he has for every form and variety of life. As he strides across the fields his great poems come into being, his step as it grows quicker and quicker gives them their rhythm, the wind gives them their melody, the distance their outlook. Any one who has been his guest there will recognise many features of the landscape in his poems, many a cottage, many a corner, many people, the little arts of the artisan. But how fugitive, how small everything appears there, everything that in the poem, thanks to the fire of the vision, is glowing, strong, and radiant with the promise of eternity! Verhaeren lives in his Walloon home in the autumn, but in spring and early summer he flees from his illness to the sea--flees from hay-fever. This illness of Verhaeren's has always seemed to me symbolical of his art and of his vital feeling, for it is, if I may say so, an elemental illness that, when pollen flies along the breeze, when spring lies out in sultry heat across the fields, a man's eyes should be filled with tears, his senses irritated, and his head oppressed. This