But the great and powerful thing in these towns is not passion; it is the hidden strength behind these passions, the noble order that keeps them in their proper limits, and holds them in check. This rumbling chaos, this inundation of things doomed to die, is dominated in the _Villes Tentaculaires_ by three or four figures standing like statues--the tamers of passions. They are what kings and priests were of old, they who have the power of bridling ebullient energies and turning them to use. With hands of iron they hold down this wild and dangerous animal, they, the new rulers, statesmen, generals, demagogues, organisers. For the town is an animal in its movements, a beast in its passions, a brute in its instincts, a monster in its strength. It is ugly, like all rut. It cannot be contemplated with a pure pleasure, like a landscape gently and harmoniously fading in forest verdure; it rather evokes, at first, loathing, hatred, caution, and hostility. But that is the great thing in Verhaeren, that he always overcomes whatever is hostile, pain and torment, by a great vista, that in this panting steam of the unæsthetic he already sees the flame of the new beauty. Here for the first time is, seen the beauty of factories, _les usines rectangulaires,_ the fascination of a railway station, the new beauty in the new things. If the town is indeed ugly in its denseness, ugly in the sense of all classical ideals; if the picture of it is indeed I cruel and frightful; it is yet not unfertile. 'Le siècle et son horreur se condensent en elle, mais son âme contient la minute éternelle.' And this I feeling, that in her the minute of eternity is contained, that she is the new thing risen above all the pasts, a new thing that one must perforce come to terms with, this feeling makes her momentous and beautiful to the poet. If her form is loathsome, grey, and sombre, her idea, her organisation, are grandiose and admirable. And here, as always, where admiration finds a pivot, it can give the whole world the swing from negation to assent. But Verhaeren is by this time too little of an artist, too much interested in all the problems of life, to be able to contemplate the idea of the modern city from the æsthetic side alone. It is for him a still more important symbol for the expression of contemporary feeling.