When the Reformation, therefore, trumped her battle-cry, there throbbed a responsive echo in the hearts of the Netherlanders, long disgusted, as they were, with the excesses of a dissolute priesthood.
These societies, therefore, exerted no little influence on the social, religious, and intellectual life of the country, and became a powerful aid to the awakening of a national consciousness and to the up-building of the language and the literature.
Among them all, no other attained the distinction of the Chamber of the Eglantine at Amsterdam. This Chamber, whose device was "Blossoming in Love," was founded by Charles V., and to it belonged many of the most prominent citizens of that opulent city. All religious discussions were forbidden within its walls; and there, in that age of religious discord and rabid intolerance, both Catholic and Protestant met together in the worship of Apollo. It was to this honored body that the name of the young Vondel was introduced, and upon him, therefore, its members kept an attentive eye.
We next hear of Vondel as a youth of seventeen. He had, it seems, all the while been assisting his father in the cares of the little hosiery shop; but his mind was with his books, and he employed every spare moment in reading or in study.
About this period a friend of the family was married, and the young poet must needs try his wings. Accordingly, he wrote an epithalamium, which, unfortunately for the poet, still survives. As might have been expected, the too-aspiring youth soared on Icarian wings. However, he was not conscious of this at the time; and lame and faulty as these first efforts are, it may yet be surmised that he felt the thrill of inspiration and the rapture of creating no less than when, in later life, he forged those Olympian thunderbolts that fulmined over Holland, causing tyrants to shake and multitudes to tremble.
Soon after the wedding-verses, Vondel wrote a threnody on the assassination of Henry IV. of France, which was but little better than his former effort.
We hear no more of our young poet till, like the deer-stealing youth, Shakespeare, he stands, in his young and vigorous manhood, blushing at the altar. Maria de Wolff was the name of the bride that the twenty-three-year-old husband had won to share his destiny.
History does not record the circumstances nor the incidents of his wooing; but from what we know of his character, we will venture to say that it was ardently done.
Of the sonnets and the love-verses that this passion must have inspired in the soul of the young poet nothing, unfortunately, seems to be known. He who had, as a boy, written tolerable verses at the marriage of another must surely, as a man, have done something better at his own.
"All the world loves a lover," be he ever so humble. But the loves of the poets are of especial interest.