"_Mes doigts, touchez mon front et cherchez, là, Les vers qui rongeront, un jour, de leur morsure, Mes chairs; touchez mon front, mes maigres doigts, voilà Que mes veines déjà, comme une meurtrissure Bleuâtre, étrangement, en font la tour, mes las Et pauvres doigts--et que vos longs ongles malades Battent, sinistrement, sur mes tempes, un glas, Un pauvre glas, mes lents et mornes doigts!_"
Two years later, with _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, what was nervous has become almost a sort of very conscious madness: the hand on one's own pulse, the eyes watching themselves in the glass with an unswerving fixity, but a breaking and twisting of the links of things, a doubling and division of the mind's sight, which might be met with, less picturesquely, in actual madness. There are two poems, "Le Roc" and "Les Livres," which give, in a really terrifying way, the very movement of idea falling apart from idea, sensation dragging after it sensation down the crumbling staircase of the brain, which are the symptoms of the brain's loss of self-control:
_C'est là que j'ai bâti mon âme, --Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme?-- Mon âme hélas! maison d'ébène, Où s'est fendu, sans bruit, un soir, Le grand miroir de mon espoir._
_Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme, En ce nocturne et angoissant domaine? Serai-je seul avec mon orgueil noir, Assis en un fauteuil de haine? Serai-je seul, avec ma pâle hyperdulie, Pour Notre-Dame, la Folie?_
In these poems of self-analysis, which is self-torture, there is something lacerating, and at the same time bewildering, which conveys to one the sense of all that is most solitary, picturesque and poignant in the transformation of an intensely active and keen-sighted reason into a thing of conflicting visionary moods. At times, as in the remarkable study of London called "Les Villes," this fever of the brain looks around it, and becomes a flame of angry and tumultuous epithet, licking up and devouring what is most solid in exterior space. Again, as in "Les Lois" and "Les Nombres," it becomes metaphysical, abstract, and law towers up into a visible palace, number flowers into a forest:
_Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres._
That art of presenting a thought like a picture, of which Verhaeren is so accomplished a master, has become more subtle than ever; and