towards the future. The town, this piled-up Babylon of stones and men, is of a sudden a living being, a vampire sucking the strength of the land; the factories, that had seemed to him nothing but an unsightly mass of masonry, now become the creators of a thousand things, which in their turn create new things out of themselves. All at once Verhaeren is the socialist poet, the poet of the age of machinery, of democracy, and of the European race. And energy fills his poetry too: it is strength let loose, enthusiasm, paroxysm, ecstasy, whatever you like to call it; but always active, glowing, moving strength; never rest, always activity. His poem is no longer declamation, no longer the marmoreal monument of a mood, but a crying aloud, a fight, a convulsive starting, a stooping down and a springing up again; it is a battle materialised. For him all values have been transmuted. It is just what had repelled him most--London, monster cities, railway stations, Exchanges, which now lure him most of all as poetic problems. The more a thing seems to resist beauty--the more he has first to discover its beauty by fighting it and wrestling with it in torment--with so much the greater ecstasy does he now extol it. The strength which had murderously raged against itself now, in creative ecstasy, breaks into the world. To tear down resistance, to snatch beauty from its most hidden corner, is now for him a tenfold strength and joy of creation. _Verhaeren now creates the poem of the great city in the dionysiac sense_; the hymn to our own time, to Europe; creates ecstasy, renewed and renewed again, in life. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Ecce Homo!_ TOWNS ('LES VILLES TENTACULAIRES') Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elles Mais leur âme contient la minute éternelle. É.V., 'Les Villes.'