Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/47

Rh wrote for his friends, and it is only occasionally that the current of his private life rises to the surface in his verse.

Apart from this large and varied literary activity, the chief events of Vondel's life were his conversion to Rome, which took place finally in 1641, though the symptoms of what was going on in the poet's mind can be traced much earlier, and the tragic events which overshadowed his closing years. Vondel's conversion was a result of the same wave of reaction which produced the Anglo-Catholicism of Laud, and which carried Crashaw, with whose ardent and mystical temperament Vondel had much in common, out of the via media altogether. Personal ties with Rome Vondel had through his only and much-loved brother, his friends Anna and Tesselschade Visscher, and his daughter, who had preceded him. The Arminians, with whom he fought his first battle against Calvinism, were liberally inclined, moving in the same direction as Hales and Chillingworth. Vondel's profoundly religious nature required more definite dogma, and it is clear from all his later poetry that he found in the faith and practice of the Church of Rome full and intense satisfaction of heart and imagination. Grotius, whom he loved and admired, was carried in the same direction by his study of antiquity.

The closing years of Vondel's life were saddened, though not embittered, by the folly of the son to whom he had transferred his business. He not only failed, but made away with