their voice, the surf of the multitude, has here become shape and music, the highest identity. With pride one can say of Verhaeren what he himself vaunts in his 'Captain': 'Il est la foule,'[8] he himself is the multitude. FOOTNOTES: [1] _A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads._ [2] 'La Conquête (_La Multiple Splendeur_). [3] 'Sous les Prétoriens' (_Au Bord de la Route_). [4] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_). [5] 'La Conquête' (_La Multiple Splendeur_). [6] _Ibid. (Ibid.)._ [7] 'La Conquête' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_). [8] 'Le Capitaine' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_). THE RHYTHM OF LIFE Dites, les rythmes sourds dans l'univers entier! En définir la marche et la passante image En un soudain langage; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prendre et capter cet infini en un cerveau, Pour lui donner ainsi sa plus haute existence. É.V., 'Le Verbe'. The rhythm of modern life is a rhythm of excitement. The city with its multitudes is never completely at rest: even in its repose, in its silence, there is a secret bubbling as of lava in the bowels of a volcano, a waiting and watching, a nervous tension tinged with fever. For the idea of energy in the myriad-headed monster city is so concentrated, so intensified, that it never loses its rumbling activity. Rest, a polar feeling, would be the inner negation, the annihilation, of this new element. True, the city with her teeming masses is not always in the fever-throes of those great eruptions of passion when through the arteries of her streets the blood streams suddenly; when all her muscles seem to contract; when cries and enthusiasm blaze up like a flame; but always something seems to be expecting this fiery second, just as in modern man there is always the whipped unrest that is avid of new things, new experiences. Modern cities are in perpetual vibration; and so is the multitude from man to man. Even if the individual is not excited, if his nerves are not always stirring with his own vibration, they are yet always vibrating in harmony with the obscure resonance of the universe. The great city's rhythm beats in our very sleep; the new rhythm, the rhythm of our life, is no longer the regular alternation of relaxation and repose, it is the steady vibration of an unintermitted activity.