ound us, even among those nearest and dearest to us!
What heroic hearts and savage beasts! The inner soul, not a new soul,
reveals itself.

In this fearful hour Belgium has seen the hidden genius of her race
emerge. The sterling qualities that she has displayed during the last
three months evoke admiration; it should not surprise any one who, in
the pages of history, has felt, coursing through the ages, the vigorous
sap of her people. Small in numbers and in territory, but one of the
greatest in Europe in virtue of her overflowing vitality. The Belgians
of today are the sons of the Flemings of Courtrai. The men of this land
never feared to oppose their powerful neighbors, the kings of France or
Spain--now heroes, now victims, Artevelde and Egmont. Their soil,
watered by the blood of millions of warriors, is the most fertile in
Europe in the harvests of the spirit. From it arose the art of modern
painting, spread throughout the world by the school of the van Eycks at
the time of the Renaissance. From it arose the art of modern music, of
that polyphony which thrilled through France, Germany, and Italy for
nearly two centuries. From it, too, came the superb poetic efflorescence
of our times; and the two writers who most brilliantly represent French
literature in the world, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, are Belgian. They
are the people who have suffered most and have borne their sufferings
most bravely and cheerfully; the martyr-people of Philip II and of
Kaiser Wilhelm; and they are the people of Rubens, the people of
Kermesses and of Till Ulenspiegel.

He who knows the amazing epic re-told by Charles de Coster: _The heroic,
joyous, and glorious adventures of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedjak_, those
two Flemish worthies who might take their places side by side with the
immortal Don Quixote and his Sancho Panza--he who has seen that
dauntless spirit at work, rough and facetious, rebellious by nature,
always offending the established powers, running the gauntlet of all
trials and hardships, and emerging from them always gay and
smiling--realizes also the destinies of the nation that gave birth to
Ulenspiegel, and even in the darkest hour fearlessly looks towards the
approaching dawn of rich and happy days. Belgium may be invaded. The
Belgian people will never be conquered nor crushed. The Belgian people
cannot die.

At the end of the story of _Till Ulenspiegel_, when they think he is
dead, and are going to bury him, he wakes up