When a man just recovered from illness steps for the first time with arms outspread, and as though climbing up from a dungeon, into the light of day, he is filled with a bliss beyond measure by the open air caressing him on all sides, by the orgies of the sunlight, the cataracts of deafening din: with a cry of infinite exultation he takes into himself the symphony of life. And from this first moment of his recovery Verhaeren was seized by a limitless thirst for the intoxication of life, as though with one single leap he would make good the lost years of his loneliness, of his illness, and of his crisis. His eyes, his ears, his nerves, all his senses, which had been a-hungered, now pounce on things with a pleasure that is almost murderous, and snatch everything to themselves in a frenzy of greed. At this time Verhaeren travelled from country to country, as though he would take possession of all Europe. He was in Germany, in Berlin, in Vienna, and in Prague; always a lonely wanderer; quite alone; ignorant of the language, and listening only to the voice of the town itself, to the strange, sombre murmuring, to the surge of the European metropolises. In Bayreuth he paid his devotions at the tomb of Wagner, whose music of ecstasy and passion he absorbed in Munich; in Colmar he learned to understand his beloved painter Mathias Grünewald; he saw and loved the tragic landscapes of northern Spain, those gloomy, treeless mountains, whose threatening silhouettes afterwards became the background of the fiery happenings in his drama of _Philip II._; in Hamburg he was an excited spectator, day by day, of the stupendous traffic, the coming and going of the ships, the unloading and the loading of cargoes. Everywhere where life was intensive, expressive, and animated with a new energy, he passionately loved it. It is characteristic of his temperament that the harmonious beauty of peaceful and empty, of sleeping and dreaming cities appealed to him less than modern cities in their pall of soot and smoke. Almost intentionally his affection turns from the traditional ideal to one yet unknown. Florence, for many centuries the symbol of all poets, disappointed him: the Italian air was too mild, these contours were too meagre, too dreamy the streets. But London, this piled-up conglomeration of dwellings and workshops; this town that might have been cast in bronze; this teeming labyrinth of dingy streets; this ever-beating, restless heart of the world's trade with its smoke of toil threatening to eclipse the sun; this was to him a revelation. Just the industrial towns, which had thus far tempted no poet; those towns which roll up the vault of their leaden sky with their own fog and smoke, which confine their inhabitants in leagues and leagues of congested masonry, these attract him. He, who revels in colour, grew fond of Paris, to which, since then, he has returned every year for the winter months. Just what is restless and