Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/51

Rh Ay! content you now all preachers East and West, Pray the saints of Dort to find your Conscience rest! 'Tis in vain ! the Lord stands knocking At the door, And that blood will plead for vengeance Evermore!"

The Decretum Horribile is an impassioned expression of his abhorrence of the doctrine which consigned newly-born infants to eternal perdition. The lofty strain of consolation in which the poem closes indicates clearly what it was in Romanism—its appeal to the heart and the imagination—which charmed him as it did Crashaw. These two poems are probably the finest expression of the mingled indignation and sorrow which is the purest note in Vondel's satire. Roskam (1630) and Harpoen (1630) are more quiet and argumentative expostulations against endless theological hatred and strife. His humour and his command of the racy dialect of Amsterdam are well shown in Rommelpot van 't Hanekot (1627), where the mutual amenities of the Contra-Remonstrant clergy are portrayed under the figure of a roost full of gobbling, scratching, fighting cocks. More purely poetic and lyric are the two strange ballads he wrote, to some popular air, when in 1654 his Lucifer was driven from the stage by the fury of the clergy. In an almost Shelleyan strain he sings of the fate of Orpheus, torn by the "rout that made the hideous roar"—