Every feeling, every sensation is, in the last instance, the transformation of pain. Everything that in vibration or by contact touches the epithelium affects it as pain. As pain, which then, by the secret chemistry of the nerves, transmitted from centre to centre, is transformed into impressions, colours, sounds, and conceptions. The poet, whose last secret really is that he is more sensitive than others, that he purifies these pains of contact into feeling with a still more delicate filter, must have finer nerves than anybody else. Where others only receive a vague impression, he must have a clear perception, to which his feeling must respond, and the value of which he must be able to estimate. In Verhaeren's very first books a particular kind of reaction to every incitement was perceptible. His feeling really responds only to strong, intensive, sharp irritation; its delicacy was not abnormal, only the energy of the reaction was remarkable. His first artistic incitement; however, that of Flemish landscapes, was only one of the retina, glaring colours, pictorial charm; only in _Les Moines_ had for the first time more delicate psychic shades been crystallised. In the meantime a transformation had taken place in his exterior life. Verhaeren had turned aside from the contemplation of Nature to concentrate his strength on the cultivation of his mind. He had travelled extensively, had been in Paris and London, in Spain and Germany; with impetuous haste he had assimilated all great ideas, all new phases, all the manifold theories of existence. Without a pause, incessantly, experiences assail him and tire him out. A thousand impressions accost him, each demanding an answer; great, sombre cities discharge their electric fire upon him, and fill his nerves with leaping flame. The sky above him is obscured by the clouds of cities; in London he wanders about as though wildered in a forest. This grey, misty city, that seems as though it were built of steel, casts its whole melancholy over the soul of him who lives there in loneliness, ignorant of the language, and who is so much the more lonely, as all these manifestations of the new life in great cities are still unintelligible to him. He is still unable to capture the poetry that is in them, and so they leap at him and penetrate him with a confused, unintelligible pain. And in this novel atmosphere the intense refinement of his nerves proceeds at such a pace that already the slightest contact with the outer world produces a quivering reaction. Every noise, every colour, every thought presses in upon him as though with sharp needles; his healthy sensibility becomes hypertrophied; that fineness of hearing, of which one is conscious, say in sea-sickness, which perceives every noise, even the slightest sound, as though it were the blow of a hammer, undermines his whole organism; every rapidly-passing smell corrodes him like an acid; every ray of light pricks him like a red-hot needle. The