Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/37

Rh or, one of his favourite stanzas, used by Constable—

"Op's winters endt,               Wanneer de lent,       Dat puick en pit der tijen,                Elck aengenaem                Voortdoet de kraem       Van haer kleenooderijen";

and many other rhythms impossible to describe here. No poet in Holland caught so much of the grace and elegance of Renaissance song. And yet Hooft is still a Dutchman. There are no "metaphysics" in his love-poetry, no super-refined idealism. Nature is never far away, and he is capable occasionally of deviating into the prosaic. Nor was he only an Epicurean lover of good verses and beautiful women, but also a scholar and thinker, the disciple of Seneca and Montaigne as well as Petrarch and Ronsard. In one of his epithalamia he turns aside to write an appreciation of Montaigne, which contains the gist of Pascal's famous disquisition on that writer and Epictetus. His Stichtrijmen en Zededichten, epigrams, inscriptions, and addresses, are condensed in style and weighty in thought. He was a staunch patriot, though more stoical in his outlook than the sensitive and sympathetic Vondel, and his patriotism finds expression in some noble occasional poems, such as the ''Lykklacht van Pieter Dirckz. Hasselaer'', as well as in his tragedies. Vondel is a greater poet than Hooft, but not a more finished artist; and in virtue of his deeper culture and varied achievements—lyric poet, tragedian, comic poet, and historian, the greatest