Against this atavism, against this bright and inalienable joy in life, the _patres_ of Sainte-Barbe could do nothing. They could only deflect his great hunger of life from material things, and turn it in the direction of science, of art. The priest they sought to make of him he has really become, only he has preached everything that they proscribed, and fought against everything that they praised. At the time Verhaeren leaves school, he is already filled with that noble yet feverish greed of life, that tameless yearning for intensive enjoyments heightened to the degree of pain which is so characteristic of him. The priesthood was repugnant to him. Nor was he more allured by the prospect, held out to him, of directing his uncle's workshop. It is not yet definitely the poetic vocation which appeals to him, but he does desire a free active calling with unlimited possibilities. To gain time for his final decision, he studies jurisprudence, and becomes a barrister. In these student years in Louvain Verhaeren gave free rein to his untameable zest in life; as a true Fleming he eschewed moderation and launched into intemperance. To this very day he is fond of telling of his liking for. good Belgian beer, and of how the students got drunk, danced at all the kermesses, caroused and feasted, when the fury came over them, and got into all kinds, of mischief, which often enough brought them into conflict with the police. Uncertainty was never a feature of his character, and so his Roman Catholicism was in those years no silent and impersonal faith, but a militant orthodoxy. A handful of hotspurs--the publisher Deman was one of them, and another was the tenor van Dyck--set a newspaper going, in which they lashed away mercilessly at the corruption of the modern world, and did not forget to blow their own trumpets. The university was not slow to veto these immature manifestations; but ere long they started a second periodical, which was, however, more in harmony with the great contemporary movements. Betweenwhiles verses were written. And still more passionate is the young poet's activity when, in the year 1881, he is called to the bar in Brussels. Here he makes friends with men of great vitality: he is welcomed by a circle of painters and artists, and a cénacle of young talents is formed who have the authentic enthusiasm for art, and who feel that they are violently opposed to the conservative bourgeoisie of Brussels. Verhaeren, who at this time greedily adopts all fashionable freakishness as something new, and struts about in fantastic apparel, promptly acquires notoriety by his vehement passionateness and his first literary attempts. He had begun to write verse in his school-days. Lamartine had been his model, then Victor Hugo, who bewitches young people, that lord of magnificent gestures, that undisputed master of words. These juvenilia of Verhaeren have never been published, and probably they have little interest, for in them his tameless vitality