Vondel's Lucifer. Joost van den Vondel

would have embraced the cause of Rome even without the alluring wiles of this fair enchantress.

      Many of his relatives, including his brother William, belonged to that faith. Many of his dearest friends also were of that denomination. His daughter Anna, furthermore, had not only entered that church, but had also taken the veil. Moreover, he had long been drifting away from the creed of his early childhood, the Anabaptism of his parents. The severe pietism of that belief had never strongly appealed to him. True, he had espoused the cause of the Arminians, as against their enemies the Gomarists; but it was only because they were the under side, and because their cause was also the cause of civil liberty, that he had entered the lists with them.

      The perpetual discord, the disunion, the bickerings, the bitterness, and the persecutions among the different Protestant sects of the period were exceedingly repulsive to him. He did not forget that under the banner of Protestantism his country had triumphed over the common foe. He did not forget that Calvin had been the herald of science and the apostle of liberty. He did not fail to remember the glories of the past. But the contemplation of that proud past only increased his abhorrence of the petty present.

      Calvinism had indeed done much for Holland; but the inevitable reaction had come, and its excesses could not be justified. Calvinism had come to mean dogma; and dogma had no attraction for his poetic mind. Calvinism had become the foe of freedom; and freedom was the very breath of this flaming patriot. Calvinism had shown itself an enemy of the arts, of poetry, and of the drama; and these were as the very soul of Vondel.

      How could he know that this was only a fleeting gloom, from which the sun of Calvinism would again emerge, radiant with all of its original glory? He was weary—weary of the discord, and longed for peace.

      Is it to be wondered at that the poet gradually drifted, even as Cardinal Newman, into a haven that promised such longed-for rest? Is it surprising that he who had so long been chilled by the cold formalism and the frigid austerity of the dogma of the North should now find it agreeable to thaw out his soul in the glow of the religion of the South? Then, too, the beauty of the Catholic ritual, the pomp, the grand processional, the holy days, the glorious music, the noble symmetry of the Roman architecture, the awe-inspiring antiquity of the Church, the magnificence of its domain, the splendor of its organization, allured the imagination of the poet with irresistible power; and his reason followed, a not unwilling captive.

      Nor was it the hasty choice of a regretted impulse. Everything tends to show—we have traced the gradual growth in his poems—that it was a long-contemplated step from which, once taken, nothing should ever be able to remove him. It is, therefore, in Vondel that we find one of the most able and ardent champions the Church of Rome has ever had. No saint ever more truly deserved canonization than this high priest of Apollo, flaming with zeal for his adopted faith.

      Vondel was a crusader born five hundred years too late—a crusader, too, a lion-hearted defender of the Cross, most of whose battles were fought beneath the brow of Mount Zion and within the very gates of Jerusalem.

      Few crusaders, indeed, had fought so long and so well; few had won so many victories, had slain so many enemies, as this indomitable hero of Amsterdam.

      Though bitterly opposed to the Contra-Remonstrants, he, however, helped them in decrying the growing spirit of ostentation and the vices of the day. And although he openly sided with the Remonstrants, he never joined them. But as a flower turns its head to the sun, so he, too, gradually turned towards the old belief.

      At this period, when Protestants were in turn persecuting heretics and, reveling in their sudden freedom, were indulging in all sorts of fanatical excesses, Catholicism, purified, began to live again. Furthermore, to the poetic temperament of the poet and his stern sense of justice, the bigotry of the Gomarists seemed no less odious than the more open persecutions of the Catholics of the preceding age.

      It was thus that Vondel, long tossed upon a sea of doubt, sought anchorage in a harbor where winds were calm. It was thus that this great man was led to take a step which called down upon him for many years hate, aversion, and ridicule.

      But in spite of all this he remained true to his new faith, and became a fervid Catholic; one ever consistent and true to his adopted church. Here he could remain undisturbed in his reverence for antiquity, in his worship of beauty, and in his love for poetry and art. Here there was ever a labyrinth of mystery for his aspiring soul to explore. Here the plan of salvation was not reduced to the bare expression of a logical formula.

UPWARD AND ONWARD

      But we must again make brief reference to the friends of our poet, who one by one preceded him to the grave. First Reael died. Then Hooft and Barlæus soon followed, and were both buried in the New Church at Amsterdam. Above the tomb of each Vondel wrote a short epitaph. But the keenest loss was yet to come. In 1649 Holland lost the brightest jewel in the crown of her womanhood, and Vondel, his dearest friend. Tesselschade, after many sorrows, entered peacefully into rest.

      A few years before she had had the misfortune to lose her left eye from a spark that flew out of a smithy as she passed. She bore this sad accident with cheerfulness; but a greater calamity yet awaited her. The pride of her heart, her one remaining child, her beautiful daughter Tesselschade, was suddenly cut off in the bloom of maidenhood. The disconsolate mother struggled in vain against this terrible sorrow. A year later she followed her loved ones to the tomb. She, also, was laid away in the New Church, by the side of the dead Titans of her generation who had so often made her the theme of their inspired song; where, too, Vondel himself, the greatest of them all, was eventually to lie.

      For Vondel's beautiful threnody we have unfortunately no space, but shall content ourselves with quoting the first strophe of Huyghens' touching elegy:

      "Here Tesselschade lies.

      Let no one rashly dare

      To give the measure of her worth beyond compare;

      Her glory, like the sun's, the poet's pen defies."

      Shortly after the death of his dear friend, Vondel gave up his hosiery shop in the Warmoesstraat to his son, while he himself went to live with his daughter Anna on the Cingel, on the outskirts of the city. The poet was now sixty-two years of age, and he doubtless thought to end his days in peace and studious retirement. But the battle of life for him had only just begun. He was never to know the meaning of rest.