Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/57

Rh "Constantijntje                 't Zalig kijndje                 Cherubijntje                      Van omhoog                  d'ijdelheden                 hier beneden       Uitlacht met een lodderoog."

And Huyghens has none of the grander music of Vondel, nor the charming Ronsardist strain of Hooft.

Huyghens is a poetic moralist. His poems are as occasional as Vondel's, but the occasion is generally personal, and he uses it to talk at large about himself, his work, his enjoyment of nature, of music, of books, and domestic life, and to moralise in a satirical or more elevated and pious strain. At times he sinks almost to the level of Cats in his homely didactic prattle, but usually his outlook is less bourgeois and popular, his knowledge of humanity finer, and his poems better seasoned with wit and humour. His style is, in some works especially, harsh and obscure. Donne has been made responsible for this defect, but Mr Eymael has shown that Huyghens had probably not read Donne's poems before 1630, when his own style was formed and beginning to grow simpler; and indeed the resemblance is very