To realities, and particularly to the realities of our day, lyric poets had previously felt themselves alien. It had long been a commonplace to speak of the danger to art of industrialism, of democracy, of this age of machinery which makes pur life uniform, kills individuality, and drowns romance in actualities. All these poets have looked upon the new creations, machines, railways, monster cities, the telegraph, the telephone, all the triumphs of engineering, as a drag on the soaring of poetry. Ruskin preached that workshops should be demolished and chimneys razed to the ground; Tolstoy pointed to primitive man, who produces all his requirements from his own resources independently of any community, and saw in him the moral and æsthetic ideal of the future. In poetry, the past had gradually come to be identified with the poetical. People were enamoured of the glory that was Greece, of mail-coaches and narrow, crooked streets; they were filled with enthusiasm for all foreign cultures, and decried that of our own time as a phase of degeneration. Democracy, levelling all ranks and confining even the poet to the middle-class profession of author, seemed, as a social order, to be the correlation of machinery which, by the constructive skill of workshops, renders all manual dexterity unnecessary. All the poets, who were glad to avail themselves of the practical advantages provided by technical science, who had no objection to covering immense distances in the minimum time, who accepted the comfort of the modern house, the luxury of modern conditions of life, increased pecuniary rewards and social independence, refused obstinately to discover in these advantages a single poetic motive, a single object of inspiration, the least stimulus or ecstasy. Poetry had by degrees come to be something which was the very opposite of what-, ever is useful; all evolution seemed to these poets to be, from the point of view of culture, retrogression. Now it is Verhaeren's great exploit that he effected a transmutation poetic values. He discovered the sublime in the far-spread serried ranks of democracy; beauty he found not only where it adapts itself to traditional ideas, but also where, still hidden by the cotyledon of the new, it is just beginning to unfold. By rejecting no phenomenon, in so far as an inward sense and a necessity dwelt in it, he infinitely extended the boundaries of the lyric art. He found a fruitful soil in the very places where all other poets despaired of poetic seed. He and he alone, who had for so long been eating his heart out in fierce isolation, feels the strength and fulness of society, the poetical element in the massed strength of great cities and in great inventions. _His deepest longing, his most sublime exploit is the lyric discovery of the new beauty in new things._