Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/53

 lyrics and choruses, including the stately flowing Rynstroom, The Dutch poets played a little with the usual pastoral convention, but the sincerity of their feeling for nature as they saw it around them is as clear from their poems as from their pictures. An intenser tenderness animates the few poems in which Vondel wrote of his private sorrows, notably the Uitvaert van mijn Dochterken (1633), so modern in its simplicity and discarding of seventeenth-century conventions, so artistic in its evolution and metre. It is difficult to imagine an English or French poet of the period describing a child's games without mythology or periphrasis or conceit, as Vondel ventured to do:—

"Or followed by her friends, a lusty troop,                           Trundled her hoop        Along the street, or swung shouting with glee,                            Or dandled on her knee                 Her doll with graver airs,                 Foretaste of woman's cares."

In the similar poem which he wrote thirty years later, on the death of his grandchild, sorrow yields to a lofty strain of devout resignation—

"When this our life on earth hath ended,           Begins an endless life above;       A life of God and angels tended.            His gift to those that earn His love."

Ardour, elevation, tenderness, music, these are the great qualities of Vondel's poetry, and they place him,