one of those migrations of the Teutons into the Latin lands, where they rushed ponderously to battle with wild and raucous cries, to learn, after a time, a higher culture and the finer instincts of life from those they had conquered. Verhaeren in this book does not describe what is amiable and dreamy in Flanders, not idylls, but 'les fureurs d'estomac, de ventre et de débauche,'[1] ail the explosions of the lust of life, the orgies of peasants, and even of the animal world. Before him, his old schoolfellow Rodenbach had described Flanders to the French in poems that sounded gently with a silvery note, like the peal of belfries hovering over roofs; he had reminded them of that unforgettable melancholy of the evening over the canals of Bruges, of the magic of the moonlight over fields framed with dikes and hedges of willows. But Verhaeren closes his ears to hints of death; he describes life at its maddest, 'le décor monstrueux des grasses kermesses,'[2] popular festivals, in which intoxication and sensual pleasure sting the unbridled strength of the crowd, in which the demands of the body and the greed of money come into conflict, and the bestial nature of man overthrows the painfully learned lessons of morality. And even in these descriptions, which often teem with the exuberance of Rabelais, one feels that even this explosive life is not mad enough for him, that he yearns to intensify life out and beyond reality: 'jadis les gars avaient les reins plus fermes et les garces plus beau téton.'[3] These young fellows are too weak for him, the wenches too gentle; he cries for the Flanders of olden time, as it lives in the glowing pictures of Rubens and Jordaens and Breughel. These are his true masters, they, the revellers, who created their masterpieces between two orgies, whose laughter and feasting ring into the motives of their pictures. Some of the poems in _Les Flamandes_ are direct imitations of certain interiors and sensual genre-pictures: lads afire with lust forcing wenches under the hedges; peasants in their drunken jubilation dancing round the inn table. His desire is to sing that superabundance of vitality which relieves itself by excess, excess flung into excess, even in sensual pleasures. And his own colours and words, which are laid on with lavish profusion and flow along in liquid fire, are themselves a debauch, a 'rut' (a favourite word of his). This vaunting display of seething pictures is nothing less than an orgy. A terrific sensuality rages to exhaustion as much in the execution as in the motive, a delight in these creatures who have the madness of rutting stallions, who root about in odorous meats and in the flowering flesh of women, who of set purpose gorge themselves with beer and wine, and then in the dance and in embraces discharge all the fire they have swallowed. Now and again a reposeful picture alternates, firmly fixed in the dark frame of a sonnet. But the hot wave streams over these breathing-spaces, and again