Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/30

10 from familiar objects and experiences. What exalts and distinguishes her "refereinen" is the intense feeling with which they glow, whether religious or erotic, lyrical or didactic.

The poetry of the chambers was not of a kind which could long satisfy those who had once tasted of the sweets of classical and Italian poetry, and as the sixteenth century drew to a close men of culture made strenuous efforts to reproduce in their own language what they admired in Virgil and Horace, Seneca and Cicero, Petrarch and Marot and Ronsard. One of the first and best results of these efforts was the purification of the language; and the second was the gradual substitution of a more regular metre for the loose, often doggerel, rhythm of the zinnespelen and refereinen. The first translations of the classics were in the style and verse still in vogue; but in 1597 Karel van Mander, a Flemish poet and painter, produced a version of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics which Professor Kalff describes as fairly faithful, pure in language, and written in metrical, at times even flowing, verse. Jan van der Noot (1538?-1595?), a native of Antwerp, but driven for a time to wander in other lands, and familiar with the works of Dante, Petrarch, and the Pléiade, wrote odes, sonnets, and epigrams, as well as an elaborate allegory in more than one metre. Their poetic merit is not great, but they show a significant striving after form, and some dignity of style. But the most important predecessors of the "bloeitijd" in the literature of Holland