Shakespeare and Hugo Verhaeren says: 'Ils grandissaient leur siècle.'[3] They did not depict it with the perspective of others, but out of the heart of their own greatness. Of such geniuses as Rembrandt he says: 'Si plus tard, dans l'éloignement des siècles, ils semblent traduire mieux que personne leur temps, c'est qu'ils l'ont recréé d'après leur cerveau, et qu'ils l'ont imposé non pas tel qu'il était, mais tel qu'ils l'ont déformé.'[4] But by magnifying their century, by raising even ephemeral events of their own days into a vast perspective, they themselves became great. While those who of set purpose diminish, and while those by nature indifferent, are themselves diminished and disregarded as the centuries recede, poets such as these we honour tell, like illumined belfry clocks, the hour of the time to generations yet to come. If the others bequeath some slight possession, a poem or so, aphorisms, a book maybe, these survive more mightily: they survive in some great conception, some great idea of an age, in that music of life to which the faint-hearted and the ungifted of following epochs will listen as it sounds from the past, because they in their turn are unable to understand the rhythm of their own time. By this manner of inspired vision Verhaeren has come to be the great poet of our time, by approving of it as well as by depicting it, by the fact that he did not see the new things as they actually are, but celebrated them as a new beauty. He has approved of all that is in our epoch; of everything, to the very resistance to it which he has conceived of as only a welcome augmentation of the fighting force of our vitality. The whole atmosphere of our time seems compressed in the organ music of his work; and whether he touches the bright keys or the dark, whether he rolls out a lofty diapason or strikes a gentle concord, it is always the onward-rushing force of our time that vibrates in his poems. While other poets have grown ever more lifeless and languid, ever more secluded and disheartened, Verhaeren's voice has grown ever more resonant and vigorous, like an organ indeed, full of reverence and the mystical power of sublime prayer. A spirit positively religious, not of despondency, however, but of confidence and joy, breathes from this music of his, freshening and quickening the blood, till the world takes on brighter and more animated and more generous colours, and our vitality, fired by the fever of his verse, flashes with a richer and younger and more virile flame. But the fact that life, to-day of all days, needs nothing so urgently as the freshening and quickening of our vitality, is good reason why--quite apart from all literary admiration--we must read his books, is good reason why this poet must be discussed with all that glad enthusiasm which we have first learned for our lives from his work. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'Aujourd'hui'(_Les Héros_). [2] Guyau, _L'Esthétique Contemporaine._ [3] 'L'Art' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).