Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/94

74 is the maiden martyr Iphis, who comes to the sacrifice arrayed as a bride, and with the words of the Psalmist on her lips—

"Geen hygend hart, vervolgt en afgeronnen,           Verlangde oit meer naer koele waterbronnen,            Als mijne ziel, na zoo veel strijts, verlangt            En hyght naar Godt, waeraen mijn leven hangt."

Vondel's Samson (1660) will not bear comparison for a moment with Samson Agonistes. His hero has none of the grandeur of Milton's, and the play is inferior both in unity of interest and elevation of sentiment. Vondel had not Milton's intense personal sympathy with the Old Testament hero. He fills up his drama with irrelevant discussions of the attitude of the Church to the stage, and the relation between Church and State. Samson interests him only as a type of a greater deliverer.

The Adam in Ballingschap (1664) is dramatically a weak and bourgeois presentation of the story of the Fall. Adam is scolded into participation in Eve's action. But it contains some lyrical antiphonies (an angel's song of the Creation, and songs of adoration and joy between Adam and Eve) which remind an English reader of the Prometheus Unbound. This poetic and lyric interest Vondel's dramas retained to the end. Noah, composed when he was eighty, has lyrical choruses as light and fresh as the work of a poet in the first flush of his power. The song on the death of the swan is a perfect harmony of feeling and rhythm—