Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/35

Rh Anna and Tesselschade Visscher. Here he composed his best plays, and in the last years of his life, having prepared himself for the task by a careful study of Tacitus, his historical works, including the great Nederlandsche Historien, begun in 1628 and published, but not completed, in 1642. Hooft died in 1648.

Hooft's love-poetry is the most complete representative in Holland of the love-poetry of the Renaissance, with all its conventions—Petrarchian, mythological, and pastoral. He gathered the flower in Italy and France, but he grafted it on a healthy native or naturalised stock of popular airs and rhythms, and coloured it with his own full-blooded Epicurean temperament. He wrote sonnets and wrote them well, whether purely complimentary and conventional, or passionate,—as once at any rate, in "Mijn lief, mijn lief, mijn lief"—or best of all, when the thought is weighty and dignified, as that to Hugo Grotius, which Mr Gosse has translated, or the following sonnet to a newly-born child, his nephew:—

"O fresh young fruit, that from the quiet night           Of slumber in the womb awaked, must go—            Time that lets nothing rest hath willed it so—       Forth to the whirl of sense, the realms of light!       Lo! birth hath given thee o'er to Fortune's might.            Her school is change.  She mingles joy with woe,            And woe with joy, exalts and hurls below,       Till dazed with hope and fear we darkling fight.       May He Who giveth all things grant thee a heart       Undaunted to withstand the fiercest dart            Fate in her anger at thy life may speed:       Her gifts too when in milder mood she pours       Riches and joys and honour from full stores,            Be it thine to use grateful and with good heed."