Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/45

Rh poet. Readers recognised, Brandt says, a purity of language, an elevation of thought, and a flow of verse superior to anything which Dutch poetry had yet achieved. From the publication of Palamedes onwards to the end of his life Vondel poured forth poetry in a never-failing stream, lyric and didactic, satiric and narrative, as well as dramas and translations.

Translation was to Vondel a means of preparing for original work as well as an interest in itself. Before he composed Palamedes he had put into verse a translation of the Troades of Seneca made by himself and some scholarly friends. When he learned Greek he made versions of plays of Euripides and Sophocles, and his works include complete translations in prose and verse of Virgil and Horace, as well as a metrical version of the Psalms and a prose rendering—still in manuscript—of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.

The longer didactic poems were the fruit of his conversion to Rome, and include, besides the Brieven der Heilige Maeghden (1642), which is not strictly didactic, being the "heroical epistles" of martyred maidens, the Altaergeheimenissen (1645), on the Mass, De Heerlyckheit der Kerke (1663), on the Church, and the Bespiegelingen van Godt en Godtsdienst (1662), on the divine attributes. Before he finally, in 1636, adopted tragedy as the most fitting form for great and grave poetry, he meditated an epic on the subject of Constantine, but the death of his wife broke his purpose, and his only narrative poem, Johannes de Boetgezant, is a short epic of six