Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/100

80 all his countrymen. Vague in thought at times, in ardour and sustained rhythmical flight the chorus on God in Lucifer could not be easily surpassed. No translation can do justice to the original, but a single strophe may give some impression of the tone of Vondel's religious verse:—

"Who is it that, enthroned on high,                    Deep in unfathomable light,                 Nor time nor time's eternity                     May measure being infinite?                The Self-existent, Self-sustaining,                    By and in whom all things that are,                Their course prescribed unchanged retaining,                    Move round as round their central star:                The Sun of suns, His life that lendeth                    To all our soul conceives, and all                Conception's limit that transcendeth,                    The Fount, the Sea whence on us fall                Blessings unnumbered from Him flowing,                    Proof of His wisdom, power, and grace,                Evoked from nought ere yet this glowing                    Palace of Heaven arose in space;                Where we our eyes with our wings veiling Before His radiant Majesty, Chanting the hymn of praise unfailing, Bend as we chant the adoring knee, And, falling on our face in prayer, Cry, 'Who is He? Oh! tell, proclaim! With tongue of Seraphim declare— Or knows no tongue no thought that Name?'"

The antiphonal song of the six days' creation in Adam, the description of morning and the country in Palamedes, the Phœnix chorus in Joseph, the already-mentioned Christmas and marriage songs in