To chisel this new face of God is the aim of his last and most mature works, in which the obstinate 'no' of his youth has become the loud exulting 'yes' of life, in which the great possibilities of old have become an unsuspected opulent reality. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'Un Soir' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_). [2] 'La Foule' (_Les Visages de la Vie_). THE LYRIC UNIVERSE Il faut aimer, pour découvrir avec génie. É.V., 'Un Soir.' If one is to understand Verhaeren's lyric work as a work of art, it must be kept in mind that he is a lyric poet, and a lyric poet only. A lyric poet only, not, however, in the limited sense of one who confines himself to the writing of lyric poems, but of one who, in a lofty and more extensive meaning of the term, transforms everything into emotion, who stands in a lyric relationship with all things, with the whole world. And since the innermost constitution of a man's talent unconsciously acts as the driving tendency, the direction of the aim of his life, his very fate and his conception of the world, since all this is so, the lyric poet that Verhaeren is must of necessity have a lyrical conception of the world, his cosmic feeling _must_ be lyrical. To say that he has confined himself to the lyric style would be to diminish his stature. It is true that in all Verhaeren's imaginative work--and it is of considerable volume--there is no prose. A very thin volume of short stories did indeed appear many years ago and has long been out of print; but how tentative and provisional it was in scope may be seen from the fact that Verhaeren later on turned one of the stories, that of the bell-ringer in the burning tower, into a poem. And I might mention a whole series of poems which at bottom are nothing but short stories, and others again which are saturated with dramatic excitement, quite unlyrical problems, but all of them lyrically conceived. And even in his criticism of art and in that penetrating and beautiful book of his on Rembrandt, in which he represents the organic connection of the artist with his native province almost as a personal experience, the outstanding passages live by their lyric enthusiasm. Many of the poems again are spiritualised theories of art. The origin of language or the sociological problem of emigration, the economic contrast of agrarianism and industrialism: in an essay such things might be calmly treated, coldly passed in review. But this is characteristic of Verhaeren, that he is unable to take a cold, faint interest in anything: consciously or unconsciously he must be carried away by enthusiasm for the things he contemplates. The ecstasy of his excitement involuntarily whips him out of a slow trot into lyric fervour. Poetry is to him, like his philosophy, like his ethics, a lyrical soaring. It is characteristic of the great lyric poets, of Walt Whitman, Dehmel, Carducci, Rilke, Stefan