_Les Moines_ was the last of Verhaeren's descriptive books, the last in which he stood on the outer side of things contemplating them dispassionately. But already here there is too much temperament in him to allow him to look at things as altogether unconnected and undisciplined; the joy of magnifying and intensifying by feeling already stirs in him. At the end of the book he no longer sees the monks as isolated individuals, but gathers them all together in a great synthesis in his finale. Behind them the poet sees order, a secret law, a great force of life. They, these hermits who have renounced, who are scattered over the world in a thousand monasteries, are to the poet the last remnants of a great departed beauty, and they are so much the more grandiose as they have lost all feeling for our own time. They are the last ruins of moribund Christianity in a new world, projecting, in tragic loneliness, into our own days. 'Seuls vous survivez grands au monde chrétien mort!'[2] he hails them in admiration, for they have built the great House of God, and for many generations sacrificed their blood for the Host eternally white. In admiration he hails them. Not in faith and love, but in admiration for their fearless energy, and above all because they go on fighting undaunted for something that is dead and lost; because their beauty serves none other than itself; because they project into our own time like the ancient belfries of the land, which no longer call to prayer. In a land where everything else serves a purpose, pleasure and gold, they stand lonely; and they die without a cry and without a moan, fighting against an invisible enemy, they, the last defenders of beauty. For at that time, at that early stage of his career, beauty for Verhaeren was still identical with the past, because he had not yet discovered beauty for himself in the new things; in the monks he celebrates the last romanticists, because he had not yet found poetry in the things of reality, not yet found the new romance, the heroism of the working-day. He loves the monks as great dreamers, as the _chercheurs de chimères sublimes_, but he cannot help them, cannot defend what they possess, for behind them already stand their heirs. These heirs are the poets--a curious echo of David Strauss's idea about religion--who will have to be, what religion with its faithful was to the past, the guardians and eternal promoters of beauty. They it will be--here rings strangely the deepest intention of Verhaeren's later work--who will wave their new faith over the world like a banner, they, 'les poètes venus trop tard pour être prêtres,'[3] who shall be the priests of a new fervour. All religions, all dogmas, are brittle and transitory, Christ dies as Pan dies; and even this poetic faith, the last and highest conquest of the mind, must in its time pass away.