Nomz (d. 1803) furnished the theatre of Amsterdam with many pieces, original and translated, and merited a better fate from his native city than to die in the public hospital.
The poets who mark the age from Madame Van Merken to Bilderdyk, are Van Alphen, Bellamy, and Nieuwland. Van Alphen (d. 1803) is distinguished for his patriotism, originality, and deeply religious spirit. His poems for children are known by heart by all the children of Holland, and he is their national poet, as Cats is the poet of mature life and old age. Bellamy, who died at the early age of twenty-eight years (1786), left many poems characterized by originality, force, and patriotic fervor, no less than by beauty and harmony of style. Nieuwland (d. 1794), like Bellamy, rose from the lower order of society by the force of his genius; at the age of twenty-three he was called to the chair of philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy at Utrecht, and later to the university of Leyden. He was equally great as a mathematician and as a poet in the Latin language as well as his own. All his productions are marked by elegance and power.
Styl (d. 1804) was a poet as well as a historian; one of the most valuable works on the history of the country is his "Growth and Prospects of the United Provinces." Te Water, Bondam, and Van de Spiegel contributed to the same department.
Romance writing has, with few exceptions, been surrendered to women. Among the romances of character and manners, those of Elizabeth Bekker Wolff (d. 1804) are distinguished for their brilliant and caustic style, and those of Agatha Deken for their earnest and enlightened piety. The works of both present lively pictures of national character and manners.
7. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.—The political convulsions of the last years of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, which overthrew the Dutch Republic, revolutionized the literature not less than the state,—and the new era was illustrated by its poets, historians, and orators. But in the elevation of inferior men by the popular party, the more eminent men of letters for a time withdrew from the field, and the noblest productions of native genius were forgotten in the flood of poor translations which inundated the country and corrupted the taste and the language by their Germanisms and Gallicisms.
Among the crowd of poets, a few only rose superior to the influences of the time. Feith (d. 1824) united a lofty patriotism to a brilliant poetical genius; his odes and other poems possess rare merit, and his prose is original, forcible, and elegant.
Helmers (d. 1813) is most honored for his poem, "The Dutch Nation," which, with some faults, abounds in beautiful episodes and magnificent passages.
Bilderdyk (1756-1831) is not only the greatest poet Holland has produced, but he is equally eminent as a universal scholar. He was a lawyer, a physician, a theologian, a historian, astronomer, draftsman, engineer, and antiquarian, and he was acquainted with nearly all the ancient and modern languages. In 1820 he published five cantos of a poem on "The Destruction of the Primitive World," which, though it remains unfinished, is a superb monument of genius and one of the literary glories of Holland. Bilderdyk excelled in every species of poetry, tragedy only excepted, and his published works fill more than one hundred octavo volumes.
Van der Palm (b. 1763) occupies the same place among the prose writers of the nineteenth century that Bilderdyk does among the poets. He held the highest position as a pulpit orator and member of the Council of State, and his discourses, orations, and other prose works are models of style, and are counted among the classics of the country. His great work, however, was the translation of the Bible.
Since the time of Bilderdyk and Van der Palm no remarkable genius has appeared in Holland.