Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/384

364 tragedies which have the sweep and glitter of waves in mid-ocean:—

"De koesterende zon, tot 's avonts van den morgen,    Voltreckt haer ronde, toont elk een haer aengezicht  En straelen, dagh op dagh, blijft nimmermeer verborgen,     En begenadight elk met warmte, en heilzaem licht.  Zy schijnt rondom den ringk des aerdtrijcks, naar elks wenschen,     Een ieder even na, een ieder even schoon,  Gewelkomt, en onthaelt bij dieren, en bij menschen,     En planten, waerze blinckt uit haeren gouden troon."

That is Vondel at his most flamboyant, a Rubens in lyrical poetry. But he can change his rhythm, when the subject requires, to the quiet flow of a pastoral stream, as in his beautiful rendering of the twenty-third psalm—

"D' Almaghtige is mijn herder, en geleide.               Wat is er datme schort?             Hij weit my, als zijn schaep, in vette weide,                Daer gras noch groen verdort."

Besides this wealth of metrical effect, the Dutch lyrical poetry has most of the beauties and affectations of Renaissance poetry,—the flamboyant mythology, the pastoral and amorous conventions, the conceits, Petrarchian and Marinistic in Hooft, Dubartist in Vondel, and touched in Huyghens with the intellectuality and obscurity of Donne,—

"De Britse Donn'                                  Die duistre zon,"—

"that obscure sun," as Vondel calls him. But this taste for conceit does not conceal the sincere, personal, natural note which distinguishes Dutch poetry, as it does Dutch art.