unheeding. He has worked, and let his work grow slowly and organically. And thus fame, which slowly but with irresistible sureness has grown to his stature, has not disturbed him. It is a pleasure to see how he has stood this last and greatest test, how he shoulders his fame stoutly, with joy but without pride. To-day Belgium celebrates in him her greatest poet. In France, where he was held an alien, he has forced esteem. The greatest good has been done, however, by the fact that from foreign races, from the whole of Europe and beyond it, from America, an answer has come to his great reputation, that the little enmities of the nations have called a halt before his work, and above all that it is the younger generation who are to-day enlisted under the banner of his enthusiasm. Inexhaustible has been his interest in young men; perhaps he has welcomed and encouraged every beginner with only too much kindness. For his delight in the art of others is inexhaustible; his infinite feeling of identity makes him in the highest sense impartial and enthusiastic, and it is a delight to see him stand in front of great works and to learn enthusiasm from him. This apparent contrast between the art of his poetry and the art of his life is at first strange and surprising. For behind so passionate a poet one would never suspect so quiet and kind a man. Only his face--which has already allured so many painters and sculptors--speaks of passions and ecstasies; that brow across which, under locks growing grey, the deep lines graven by the crisis of his youth run like the furrows of a field. The pendent moustache (like that of Nietzsche) lends his face power and earnestness. The salient cheek-bones and sharply chiselled lines betray his peasant extraction, which is perhaps still more strongly accentuated by his gait, that hard, strikingly rhythmical, bowed gait which reminds one of the plougher treading in hard toil and in a bent posture over newly turned turf, his gait whose rhythm reminds one again and again of his poetry. But goodness shines in his eyes, which--_couleur de mer_--as though new-born after all the lassitude of the years of fever, are bright and fresh with life; there is goodness, too, in the hearty spontaneity of his gestures. In his face the first impression is strength; the second, that this strength is tempered with kindness. Like every noble face, it is, when translated into sculpture, the idea of his life.