Et les vitraux, grands de siècles agenouillés Devant le Christ, avec leurs papes immobiles Et leurs martyrs et leurs héros, semblent trembler Au bruit d'un train hautain que passe sur la ville. (Tr. 6) Verhaeren appears a direct son of Victor Hugo, especially in his earliest works. Even after his evolution towards a poetry more freely feverish, he still remains romantic. Here, to explain this, are four verses evoking the days of former times. Jadis--c'était la vie errante et somnambule, A travers les matins et les soirs fabuleux, Quand la droite de Dieu vers les Chanaans bleus Traçait la route d'or au fond des crépuscules. Jadis--c'était la vie énorme, exaspérée, Sauvagement pendue aux crins des étalons, Soudaine, avec de grands éclairs à ses talons Et vers l'espace immense immensément cabrée. Jadis--c'était la vie ardent, évocatoire; La Croix blanche de ciel, la Croix rouge d'enfer Marchaient, à la clarté des armures de fer, Chacune à travers sang, vers son ciel de victoire. Jadis--c'était la vie écumante et livide, Vécue et morte, à coups de crime et de tocsins, Bataille entre eux, de proscripteurs et d'assassins, Avec, au-dessus d'eux, la mort folle et splendid. (Tr. 7) These verses are drawn from _Villages illusoires_, written almost exclusively in assonant free verse, divided by means of a gasping rhythm, but Verhaeren, master of free verse, is also master of romantic verse, to which he can force, without being dashed to pieces, the unbridled, terrible gallop of his thought, drunk with images, phantoms and future visions. HENRI DE RÉGNIER He lives in an old Italian palace where emblems and figures are written on walls. He muses, passing from room to room. Towards evening he descends the marble stairs and goes into gardens flagged like streams, to dream of his life among fountain basins and ponds, while the black swans grow alarmed in their nests, and a peacock, alone like a king, seems to drink superbly the dying pride of a golden twilight. De Régnier is a melancholy, sumptuous poet. The two words which most often break forth in his verses are _or_ and _mort_ (gold and death) and there are poems where the insistence of this royal and autumnal rhyme returns and even induces fear. In the collection of his last works we could doubtless count more than fifty verses ending thus: golden birds, golden swans, golden basins, golden flowers, and dead lake, dead day, dead dream, dead autumn. It is a very curious obsession and symptomatic, not of a possible verbal poverty, rather the contrary, but of a confessed liking for a particularly rich colour and of a sad richness like that of a setting sun, a richness turning into the darkness of night.