suffering with Nature, this feeling in oneself of the pain which goes before the spring, this torment of the breaking forth of sap, of pressure in the air, has always appeared to me a symbol of the elemental and physical way that Verhaeren feels Nature. For it is as though Nature, which gives him all ecstasies, all its own dark secrets, gives him its own pain as well, as though its web reached into his blood, his nerves, as though the identity between the poet and the world had here attained a higher degree than in other men. In these painful first days of spring he flees to the sea, whose singing winds and sounding waves he loves. There he works rarely, for the restlessness of the sea makes him restless himself; it gives him only dreams, no works. But Verhaeren is no longer a primitive spirit. He is attached by too many bonds to his contemporaries, too much in contact with all modern striving and creation, to be able to confine himself wholly to a rural existence. There is in him that wonderful double harmony of modern men which lives in brotherly communion with Nature and yet clings to Nature's supreme flower of culture. During the winter Verhaeren lives in Paris, the most alive of all cities; for, though quiet is an inner need of his, he looks on the unrest and noise of great cities as a precious stimulant. Here he receives those impressions of noisy life which, remembered in tranquillity, become poems. He loves to drift in the many-voiced confusion of teeming streets, to receive inspiration from pictures, books, and men. For years, in intimate cohesion with all that is coming into existence and growing in strength, he has followed the most delicate stirrings of the evolution of art, here too in the happiest manner combining detachment with sympathy. For he does not live really in Paris itself, but in Saint-Cloud, in a little flat which is full of pictures and books, and usually of good friends as well. For friendship, living, cheerful comradeship, has always been a necessity of life to him, to him who has the faculty of giving himself so whole-heartedly in friendship; and there is hardly one among the poets of to-day who has so many friends, and so many of the best. Rodin, Maeterlinck, Gide, Mockel, Vielé-Griffin, Signac, Rysselberghe, Rilke, Romain Rolland, all these, who have done great things for our time, are his close friends. With associates of this stamp he passes his life at Paris, carefully avoiding what is called society, aloof from the salons where fame is cultured and the transactions of art are negotiated. His innermost being is simplicity. And all his life long this modesty has made him indifferent to financial success, because he has never desired to rise above the primitive necessities of his life, never known the longing to dazzle and to be envied. While others, goaded by the success of their acquaintances, have been thrown off their balance and have worked themselves to death in fever, he has gone on his way calm and