The life-work of great artists contains not only a single, but a threefold work of art. The actual creation is only the first, and not always the most important; the second must be the life of the artists themselves; the third must be the harmoniously finished, organically connected relationship between the act of creating and the thing created, between poetry and life. To survey how inner growth is connected with external formation, how crises of physical reality are connected with artistic decadence, how development and completion interpenetrate as much in personal experience as in the artistic creation, must be an equal artistic rapture, must disengage as pure a line of beauty as the individual work. In Verhaeren these conditions of the threefold work of art are accomplished in full. Harsh and abrupt as the contrasts in his books seem to be, the totality of his development is yet rounded off to a clear line, to the figure of a circle. In the beginning the end was contained, and in the end the beginning: the bold curve returns to itself. Like one who travels round the world and circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to his starting-point. Beginning and end touch in the motive of his work. To the country to which his youth belonged his old age returns: Flanders inspired his first book, and to Flanders his last books are dedicated. True it is, between these two books _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Blés Mouvants_, between the work of the man of five-and-twenty and that of the man of sixty, lies the world of an evolution with, all its points of view and achievements. Only now, when the line that was at first so capricious has returned to itself, can its form be surveyed and its harmony perceived. A purely external observation has become penetration: the eye no longer exclusively regards the external phenomena of things, but all has been seized in his soul from within and imaged in accordance with its reality. Now nothing is seen isolated, from the point of view of curiosity or passing interest, but everything is looked upon as something that is, that has grown, and that is still growing. The motive is the same in the first and in the last books; only, in the first book we have isolated contemplation, while in the great creations of the last period the vast horizons of the modern world are set behind the scenes, with the shadows of the past on the one side, and, as well, with fiery presentiments of the future shedding a new light over the landscape. The painter, who only portrayed the outer surface, the patina, has developed into the poet, he who in a musical vibration vivifies the psychic and the inconceivable. These two works stand in the same relation to each other as Wagner's first operas, _Rienzi_ and _Tannhäuser_, do to his later creations, to the _Ring_ and _Parsifal_: what was at first only intuitive becomes consciously creative. And as in Wagner's case, so too with Verhaeren there are to this very day people