Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/61

Rh Wiele, by Van Vloten, K. L. Pantheon, 1865. The first critic to do justice to Van der Wiele was J. A. Alberdingk Thijm. (1579-1630). Of noble parentage, born in The Hague, for a short time an advocate in that city, Stalpert van der Wiele soon abandoned the world for the Church, and after studying divinity at Louvain was ordained deacon at Malines. He was at Brussels for some time, and visited Paris and Rome, but his ultimate sphere of duty was in Delft, Rotterdam, and Schiedam. His poems, issued at Delft, Hertogenbosch, and Antwerp, were written for the edification of his Catholic flock. The longer are mostly legends of saints and martyrs. Hemelryck (1621) tells in flowing Alexandrines how the persecuting Adrian of Nicomedia was converted by the description which the martyrs gave him of the joys of heaven. Others deal with the martyrdom of Laurence and Hippolytus, St Agnes' denunciation of gorgeous clothing, and the points at issue between Rome and Calvin. But Stalpert van der Wiele's best-known and best poems are the religious songs he wrote to old and frequently secular airs. Den Schat der geestelijcke Lofsangen, gemaeckt op de feest-daegen van &#x27;tgeheele jaer (1634), is a Roman Christian Year. Of the deeper thought and more elaborate art of Keble there is as little in Van der Wiele's songs as of the conceits, quaint or imaginative, of our seventeenth-century devotional poets. His songs are written for the people, and express the simplest Catholic piety with the naturalness and music of the folk-songs on