He objectifies his personality in the work of art, hammering out of the cold blocks, that weighed upon him with the weight of iron, monuments and statues of pain. All the feelings which of old weighed down upon him like dull fog, formless and prisoned in dream like nightmares, now become clear statues, symbols in stone of his soul's experiences. The poet has torn his fear, his burning, moaning, horrible fear, out of himself, and poured it into his bell-ringer, who is consumed in his blazing belfry. He has turned the monotony of his days to music in his poem of the rain; his mad fight against the elements, which in the end break his strength, he has shaped into the image of the ferryman struggling against the current that shatters his oars one after the other. His cruel probing of his own pain he has visualised in the idea of his fishermen, who with their nets all in holes go on fishing up nothing but suffering on suffering out of the sombre stream; his evil and red lusts he has spiritualised in his _Aventurier_, in the adventurer who returns home from a far land to celebrate his wedding feast with his dead love. Here his feelings are shaped no longer in moods, in the fluid material of dreams, but in the infinitely mobile form of human beings. Here there is symbolism in the highest sense, in Goethe's sense of liberation. For every feeling that has achieved artistic shape is as it were conjured away out of the breast. And thus the too heavy pressure slowly disappears from the poet's being, and the morbid fever from his work. Now and now only does he recognise the suicidal cowardice behind the visor of the pride that forced him to fly from the world, now and now only does he understand that fatal egoism which had taken refuge beyond the pale of the world: J'ai été lâche et je me suis enfui Du monde, en mon orgueil futile,[3] This confession is the last liberating word of the crisis. Now his despair--a despair like that of Faust--is overcome. The mood of Easter morning begins to sound the exulting cry, 'Earth has me again!'[4] with the anthems of the resurrection. Verhaeren has described this deliverance, this ascent from illness to health, from the most despairing 'no' to the most exultant 'yes,' in many symbols, most beautifully in that magnificent poem wherein St. George the dragon-slayer bows down to him with his shining lance; and again in that other poem in which the four gentle sisters approach him and announce his deliverance: L'une est le bleu pardon, l'autre la bonté blanche, La troisième l'amour pensif, la dernière le don D'être, même pour les méchants, le sacrifice.[5] Goodness and love call to him now from where of old there were only hatred and despair. And in their approach already he feels the hope of recovery, the hope of a natural, artistic strength.