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314 . He too was bewitched by that atmosphere of magic half-shadows full of a tragic-ascetic whispering. But in reality Maeterlinck is a translator, an adapter, a popularizer. He translated Novalis from the German, Ruysbroeck from the Flemish, Ford and Shakespeare from the English. In the Treasure of the Humble and in the various Double Gardens and Buried Temples that followed it, he adapted the religious mysticism of the primitives and the lay mysticism of Carlyle and Emerson. In the Life of the Bee and the Intelligence of Flowers he popularized the scientific manner of Fabre. Of late, following the tastes of his Anglo-Saxon and German clientèle, he has started dispensing the marvels and novelties of occultism and psychical research, not without a dash of spiritism and a sprinkling of theosophy. He began with a book on Death, which I read patiently, though I found nothing in it that was worth remembering. Now he continues with his Unknown Guest, and my patience is worn out.

In this book, a collection of three or four magazine articles originally published in English, he talks of phantoms of persons living or dead, of psychometry (communication with a dead or distant person by holding in the hand something once touched by that person), of second sight, and of the horses of Elberfeldt. I have not the slightest objection to the careful