Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/63

Rh lyrical stream which, beginning in the Middle Ages, preserved in the folk-songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rather than in the "rijmelarij" of the "Rederijkers," was by Hooft and Vondel purified, deepened, and enlarged. Born in Amsterdam in 1649, Luiken was trained as an etcher, and wrote his love-songs while a young man. At the age of twenty-six he became a pious and mystical Christian, and his later works, Het Leerzaam Huisraad, Byekorf des Gemoeds, d&#x27;Onwaerdige Wereld, are written in a didactic strain, lightened by occasional flashes of his purer lyrical gift. But the Duytse Lier contains the finest love-songs after Hooft's. Luiken reproduces some of Hooft's metres, especially his iambic quatrains and the "Galatea" stanza quoted above; but he has many of his own, light and musical. He was the only Dutch poet who learnt from Hooft the secret of that fresh and charming artifice which the latter, and so many others, were taught by Ronsard—

"De dageraat begint te blinken      De Roosjes zijn aan't open gaan;       De Nucht're Zon komt peerlen drinken,       De zuyde wind speelt met de blaan:       Het Nachtegaaltjen fluyt,       En't Schaapje scheert het kruyt;                 Hoe zoet                 Is een gemoet,                 Met zulk een vreugd gevoet."

With such music the great period in Dutch poetry ended, and the lyrical began to give way, as elsewhere, to the prosaic and rhetorical.