I expected a revel of delight from Verhaeren’s _Helen_. I did not get it. At the same time I admired its reason, logical unfolding, keeping in key; few lines of color and great passion, wisely distributed. Verhaeren is best in lyrics, occasional poems, which picture Flanders. In this, if I mistake not, he is great. _Les Flamands_ is a masterpiece. And so is _Villes Tentaculaires_. What can equal those portraits of the monks! He paints with words as Flemish artists painted, The van Ostade, (Adrian and Isaac), the Brothers Maris, later, for example. Nothing too humble. He has given me pleasure. For forty years Flanders has had an increasingly talented company of men, in the novel, short story, verse, and in the history of art and art criticism, they have such commanding and accomplished figures as Dr. Josef Muls, whose books are available in most of the countries of the Continent in adequate translations. They are too little known, on this side the Atlantic. No one can count, it seems, the vagaries of editors who accept translations. Couperus, the Hollander, and Ibañez, the Spaniard, are not representative of the races to which they belong. Both, however, have been heralded as that by American editors. As an editor Mr. Kreymborg is not a success. But I admire his individual work. It is genuine. It is original. It is unblushingly itself. I think Mr. Kreymborg a man of power in a new field. He has a strange, queer, colorless daintiness. He fine-foots it, with muffled vowels like a learned fugue of long ago. He is as afraid of their bold, gay, brass blatancy, as a small boy of a scare-crow, in a cherry garden. A quaint, low-voiced, dull-hued, crotchety, somewhat ill-tempered little figure, dreaming of conjuring worlds into vision, with dim, small gestures. May he multiply and grow fat! Stuart Merrill dedicates a volume of poems to Verhaeren, whom I admire, with two lines so noble they should not be forgotten. He speaks of him as a _Nom qui sonne comme un fracas d’armes Qu’un roi barbare aurait laissé choir dans la nuit._ Albert Samain gives me something the sensation of those warmly lucid, those golden, early evenings of Lorraine which hold out life’s pitiful false promise of perfection. The same distilled imagined richness of the past! The picture of the pagan world snared his heart. His verse keeps the sensations of _un beau soir d’Italie_. It is a magnificent antique world he saw, and knows how to show. _Chariot d’Or_, by Samain, presents a way to journey with the mind, a little while, delightfully. Imagine if you can that this book of his went through eighteen editions, with speed, in France. What kind of verse-book could do that in America? Not one of _this_ class! You can not serve your soul and an editor’s taste, at the same time. _And greed!_ In America gold must be served. And then _family_!