"I know not what or Who suddenly raised me in the night, threw me from my bed without even leaving me time to dress, and prostrated me weeping and sobbing at the feet of the crucifix and before the supererogatory image of the Catholic Church, which has evoked the most strange, but in my eyes the most sublime devotion of modern times." On the following day he asked for a priest and confessed his sins. At that hour, Verlaine, the Catholic poet, was born. He was wonderfully primitive, like the early poets of the Church, and his verses were as full of profound mystic poetry as those of the saints, Augustine and Francis of Assisi, and those of the German philosopher poets, Eckart and Tauler. During these two years the neophyte wrote _Sagesse_, a volume which appeared later under the imprint of an exclusively Catholic publisher. It is the deepest and greatest work of French poetry, "the white crown of his work," Verhaeren calls it in his brilliant study of Verlaine. Here again, as once in the _Bonne Chanson_, the divergent forms of his character unite. In the unrestrained solution of everything personal in the divine, in "the melting of his own heart in the glowing heart of God," impulse and yearning are purified. Eroticism becomes spiritualized into fervor; hope, into sublime enlightenment; passion, devouring earthly dross, takes the form of mystic surrender. Thus the impulsive in Verlaine, permeated by hours of pure emotion, obtains its wild power of beauty, and trembles in the inexplicable mystery and in the stream of visionary light, so that his entire life now seems illumined. In his religion likewise it is the purely human element which is so wonderful. Verlaine does not possess the seraphic mildness of Novalis, nor the consumptive, girl-like, sickly-beautiful inclination of the pre-Raphaelites toward the miraculous image. He is passionate and vehement. He is masculine where the others become feminine. Like a timid girl, Novalis dreams of Jesus as his bride. "If I have Him only, if He only is mine," he says and his words become a chaste love song. Verlaine, however, is a reverberating echo of the great seekers after God, of the church fathers, of St. Augustine and of the mystics, and he wrestles for an almost physical love of God. His passion is often impious in its earthiness; his yearning, sacrilege. In his sonnet cycle, _Mon dieu m'a dit_, is a place where the soul, wounded by the lighting of divine love, cries out, unconscious whether in joy or pain: "Quoi, moi, moi pouvoir Vous aimer. Êtes-vous fous?" In these impious words God is humanized vividly, and yet, by the very bitterness of the struggle with His all-goodness, the poet imbues Him with an absolute perfection.