Ay! content you now all preachers Pray the saints of Dort to find your "Tis in vain! the Lord stands knocking At the door, And that blood will plead for vengeance The Decretum Horribile is an impassioned expression of his abhorrence of the doctrine which consigned newly-born infants to eternal perdition. The lofty strain of consolation in which the poem closes indicates clearly what it was in Romanism-its appeal to the heart and the imagination which charmed him as it did Crashaw. These two poems are probably the finest expression of the mingled indignation and sorrow which is the purest note in Vondel's satire. Roskam (1630) and Harpoen (1630) are more quiet and argumentative expostulations against endless theological hatred and strife. His humour and his command of the racy dialect of Amsterdam are well shown in Rommelpot van 't Hanekot (1627), where the mutual amenities of the Contra-Remonstrant clergy are portrayed under the figure of a roost full of gobbling, scratching, fighting cocks. More purely poetic and lyric are the two strange ballads he wrote, to some popular air, when in 1654 his Lucifer was driven from the stage by the fury of the clergy. In an almost Shelleyan strain he sings of the fate of Orpheus, torn by the "rout that made the hideous. roar". None of Vondel's poems stand higher to-day than the satires in the estimation of his countrymen. "As satirist," says Professor Moltzer, "Vondel is a phoenix. In him Dutch poetry attained her zenith,-that is what we may say in thinking of by far the most of his satirical poems and verses." The reason is in part that in none of his poems is Vondel's peculiar ardour of feeling combined with so much of sanity and humour, so free from pedantry and the note of overstrained ecstasy which one may detect in his as in Crashaw's religious poetry. But making allowance for this strain, the intensity of the satirical poems is only heightened and purified in the best of Vondel's religious poems. Religion. Such are, leaving the tragedies aside, the beautiful dedication to the Virgin of the Brieven der Heilige Maeghden, the De Koningklyke Harp, — a rhapsody on the Psalms of David,-and the best of the consolatory Lykklachten. Even in reading the longer didactic poems, though there is in them much that is hardly suitable for poetry, one is amazed by the poet's unflagging ardour, the range of his study, and the fertility of his thought. The tenderness of Vondel's feeling is as marked as its ardour. He has written of nature with delicacy and freshness in his Wiltzang, Lantghezang, and other lyrics and choruses, including the stately flowing Nature and Rynstroom. The Dutch poets played a little Sorrow. with the usual pastoral convention, but the sincerity of their feeling for nature as they saw it around them is as clear from their poems as from their pictures. An intenser tenderness animates the few poems in which Vondel wrote of his private sorrows, notably the Uitvaert van mijn Dochterken (1633), so modern in its simplicity and discarding of seventeenth-century conventions, so artistic in its evolution and metre. It is difficult to imagine an English or French poet of the period describing a child's games without mythology or periphrasis or conceit, as Vondel ventured to do: "Or followed by her friends, a lusty troop, Along the street, or swung shouting with glee, Her doll with graver airs, Foretaste of woman's cares." In the similar poem which he wrote thirty years later, on the death of his grandchild, sorrow yields to a lofty strain of devout resignation "When this our life on earth hath ended, Begins an endless life above; A life of God and angels tended, His gift to those that earn His love." Ardour, elevation, tenderness, music, these are the great qualities of Vondel's poetry, and they place him, C in spite of defects which will appear more clearly when we come to speak of his drama, at the head of Dutch poets. Outside The poets of whom we have spoken hitherto belong all more or less closely to the Amsterdam circle of which the "Oude Kamer" was the general, Amsterdam. Hooft's residence the more select, centre. Of lesser lights, such as Anna and Tesselschade Visscher, it is impossible to speak here. Outside Amsterdam there were of course other chambers, centres of dramatic and poetic activity. Zeeland was "a nest of singing-birds." The Zeeuwsche Nachtegaal, published at Middelburg in 1623, contained poems "door verscheyden treffelicke Zeeuwsche Poeten." And the song-books mentioned earlier are but some of many which were issued, and not in Amsterdam alone. Huyghens. 1 The most distinguished, if not the most popular, of the poets not connected with Amsterdam is the poet and statesman of The Hague, Constantijn Huyghens (1596-1687), the famous father of a more famous son. French was the language of the Court, and Huyghens, who was all his life in the active service of the House of Orange, as well as one of the most cultured men of his day, was 1 Gedichten, ed. Dr J. A. Worp, in nine volumes. All the poems, Latin, French, Dutch, &c., are arranged in chronological order. Huyghens' own arrangement is preserved in the Pantheon edition of the Korenbloemen, edited by Dr J. van Vloten, and revised in parts by H. J. Eymael and J. Heinsius. Much has been written of late on Huyghens as man and poet by Potgieter, Jonckbloet, Kalff, Eymael, and others. almost as prolific a composer in French and Latin as in Dutch. He tried his hand, like Milton, at Italian verses, and he translated from Guarini and Marino, as well as some thirteen hundred Spanish proverbs and about twenty of Donne's songs and elegies. Huyghens visited England three or four times in the service of his country, was knighted by James, and seems to have seen something of English men of letters at the house of Sir Robert Killigrew. For his courtly and politer poetry Huyghens used French by preference. His French poems are quite in the affected, Marinistic, complimentary vein of the day. In Dutch his tone becomes more homely, his style more masculine,-not without affectations, but affectations which recall Jonson and Donne rather than Marino. He used his native language to correspond in playful and delightful verses with intimate friends, such as Hooft and Tesselschade Visscher, and to compose epigrams and longer poems of a satiric, didactic, and reflective character. The Otia (1625) included poems in various languages. In the Korenbloemen (flowers gathered from among the grain of a busy life), published towards the close of his long life (1672), he collected his Dutch poems alone in twenty-seven books. Of these, fifteen contain epigrams (Sneldichten), one translations, two lighter lyrics and epistles. The longer poems include 't Kostelyck Mal (1622), a satire on the dress of the day in the usual Alexandrines; 't Voorhout (1621), a fresh and sparkling eulogy of the forest outside The Hague, written in stanzas of eight trochaic |