Verhaeren's success, one may well say triumph, has been strongest and most impressive in Germany; here it has been unexpectedly intensive even to us who have worked for it. A few years have sufficed to make him as popular here I as any native poet, and the most beautiful feature of his success is this, that people are already forgetting to look upon him as a foreigner. Verhaeren is to-day part and parcel of German culture; and much of our contemporary lyric poetry, its welcome turning to optimism for example, would be unthinkable but for his work and influence. Countless are the essays devoted to him, the recitations in which our best elocutionists--Kainz, Moissi, Kayssler, Heine, Wiecke, Durieux, Rosen, Gregori--have taken part; none of these interpreters, however, were as enthusiastically applauded as was Verhaeren himself on his _tournée_ in Germany, which was a great experience no less for him than for our public, because he gladly felt that his work was now rooted for ever in German soil. In Scandinavia, where Johannes V. Jensen in his essays unconsciously transcribed Verhaeren's lyric work, Ellen Key, the inspired prophetess of the feeling of life, has hailed him as she has hailed no other, and Georg Brandes, who crowns poets, has welcomed him with loud acclaim. Incessantly, in an irresistible, sure ascent, Verhaeren's fame grows. And above all, his poetry is no longer regarded as an individual thing, but as a work, as a cosmic philosophy, as an answer to the questions of our time, as the strongest and most beautiful enrichment of our vital feeling. Wherever people are tired of pessimism, tired of confused mysticism, and tired of monistic shallowness; wherever a longing stirs for a pure idealistic form of contemplation, for a new reconciliation between our new realities and the old reverence for eternal secrets, for the secularisation of the divine, his name stands in the front rank. An answer comes from every direction, not because his work was a question, but because it was in itself an answer to the unconscious demand for a new community, a demand which is being made by men of all nations everywhere to-day.