At the beginning of the century the language was hardly fit for literary use. The school of Vondel in one generation—the first half of the seventeenth century—did for Holland what the thirteenth century had done for Italy and the sixteenth for England. Vondel, no less than Shakespeare, was the creator of an epoch. His influence on his own language was equally as wonderful, his impress on his country's literature almost as great.
To him the poets of the following generations, even the great Bilderdÿk, looked for inspiration. To him also they have ever paid homage.
Like Homer, he also found his Zoilus, but the greatest intellects of his country and his age—and surely few epochs have seen greater—Grotius, Hooft, Vossius, Huyghens, and scores of others of almost equal fame thought him not inferior to the noblest poets of antiquity.
Vondel lived in a memorable epoch and was its personification. It was the Augustan Era of Holland, the Dutch Age of Pericles. Amsterdam, like another Athens, had become the centre of the world's civilization. Nowhere in that age were the arts so sedulously cultivated; nowhere had their cultivation been rewarded by such high attainment.
Science, the world puzzler, opened his toy-box, the universe, and showed its countless wonders. Philosophy, with guessive hand, played at the riddle Destiny, and mild Religion, at the game of War. Literature, the sum of all the arts and all the sciences, shone like the dazzling Arctic sun in its brief midnight noon—one hour of glory in a day of gloom. When the poet died, the epoch died with him. A night of mediocrity now brooded over the marshy fens of Holland. A swarm of poetasters succeeded the race of poets. Originality was banished. Affectation, with his sycophantic wiles, had won the heart of a degenerate generation. Art, like a flower suddenly deprived of the warm kisses of day, pined away in the sterile cold. Genius was dead.
Vondel is preëminently the poet of freedom. The principles sanctified by the blood of his countrymen, and won by nearly a century of the most noble daring and heroic endurance, he, as the voice of his nation, glorified in his beautiful pastoral, the "Leeuwendalers." These same principles also became the rallying shout of the English Revolution of 1688. That same war-cry, reechoing at Lexington and Alamance, swept the American Colonies from Bunker Hill to Guilford Court House like a whirlwind of flame; and tyranny, with shuddering dread, fled to its native lair.
The shibboleth of liberty, first blown with stirring trumpet tones across the watery moors of Holland by the patriot-poet Vondel, was now repeated in deathless prose at Mecklenburg and Philadelphia. A new United States arose like a glorious phoenix from the ashes of the old.
For the American Constitution was but the grand conclusion of that lingering bloody syllogism of freedom, of which the Treaty of Munster was the major premise. And Vondel, inspired logician of the true, unravelling the tangled skein of his country's destiny, also uncoiled the golden thread of our great fate.
Of his magnificent works, the natural heritage of the American people, we here present this choice fragment, the "Lucifer," aglow with the eternal spirit of revolt.
And now we leave our poet. A spotless name, the record of a noble, sacrificing life, a message of beauty, and a treasury of immortal truths—this was Vondel's legacy to his countrymen.