His yearning is now _vivre ardent et clair_, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest. Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are now eternal immutable laws. The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image, achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own. But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms. He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only as something in the present, but as something that has been and is becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most precious books--_Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains_---books which by their mere title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to all the ages. _S'élancer vers l'avenir_ is the longing they express: a turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress its new form on a new law. In _Les Visages de la Vie_ Verhaeren has in individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy,