did. The ten years of drudgery in his old age compensated for a

life-time of leisure and literary retirement; for after his marriage at twenty-six, the poet hosier wisely left his business affairs in the hands of his energetic and trustworthy wife. Soon after her death the business devolved on "Joost" the younger, with the disastrous results already narrated.

At the age of eighty the old bard was given an honorable discharge, with full pay, the circumstances of which were not without pathos. When told that he was discharged, and that another had been found to take his place, the poet was dumbfounded and became very sad. But when he learned that his discharge was an honorable one, with a pension, the heaviness left him, and he seemed greatly pleased.

Never, however, was Vondel so near the brow of Parnassus as during these ten bitter years. For this is the period of his greatest literary activity. It was then that his genius ripened into its full maturity.

Among other works produced during this decade were his "Jephtha," a tragedy, with which he himself was much pleased, as fulfilling every requirement of the classic drama; his metrical translations of the "Œdipus Rex," "Iphigenia in Tauris," and the "Trachiniæ;" of Sophocles; the tragedies, "David in Exile" and "David Restored," allegories in which the exile and the restoration of Charles II. were clearly set forth; "Adonis," "Batavian Brothers," "Faeton," and "Zungchin, or, the Fall of the Chinese Empire." Of special interest also, and of unusual literary merit, is his tragedy, "Samson," which, even as Milton's "Samson Agonistes," was perhaps more largely biographical than any other of his poems. The points of similarity between this drama and Milton's tragedy also are many and remarkable.

But the two most important tragedies of this period were his "Adam in Exile" and the "Noah," which together with the "Lucifer" form a grand trilogy. The "Adam," especially, only less sublime than the latter, has more of idyllic beauty, and as a whole is scarcely inferior in power. Here, too, the choruses blend with the action, and are unsurpassed for melody, sweetness, and tenderness, proclaiming their author as the foremost lyrist of his nation.

THE VALLEY.

Vondel was the author of no less than thirty-three tragedies. Only eighteen of these, however, were presented on the stage. Some were deemed objectionable on account of their Biblical subject matter; others because of their leaning towards Catholicism.

The dramatist also suffered from the jealousy of his rivals. One of these, Jan Vos, was one of the managers of the theatre, and attempted to make Vondel's plays unpopular by assigning the most important rôles to inferior players, and also by using old and worn-out costumes. No wonder, then, that the sweeping tragedies of this master spirit began to lose favor with the masses, and that the translations of the French and Spanish plays that now flooded the country, with their extravagant scenery and their flashy innovations, usurped their place.

A few years before his death, Vondel paid a visit to the town of his birth, Cologne, and there saw the very house where he was born. With a poet's whim he climbed into the old wall bedstead in which he was brought into the world, which, of course, also furnished inspiration for a poem.

Brief mention must also be made of Vondel's last religious poems. His sublime "Reflections on God and Religion," which was written in opposition to the Epicurean and Lucretian philosophy of Descartes; his "John, the Messenger of Repentance," which glows with all the fervor and the grandeur of the Apocalypse; his "Glory of the Church," a work as learned as it was elevated, which shows the rise and progress of the Mother Church, would alone be sufficient to entitle Vondel to be considered as one of the great religious poets of the world, and perhaps the most powerful champion of Catholicism that ever entered the lists of controversy.

At the age of eighty-four, Vondel translated Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and also wrote a great number of poems of all kinds--epigrams, lyrics, letters, lampoons, dedications, eulogies, threnodies, hymns, epithalamiums, riddles, and epitaphs--in all of which his pen, sharpened by the practice of nearly three-fourths of a century, excelled.

To the last the aged poet preserved his intense satiric vein. The fire of his spirit burned as fiercely now as in the days of his youth. One of the last poems written by those aged fingers was his noble elegy on the distinguished brothers De Witt, who, in 1672, were assassinated in The Hague by a frenzied mob.

His last production was an epithalamium on the marriage of his favorite niece, Agnes Blok. He was then eighty-seven years old. His physician having cautioned him to rest his brain, he now bade the Muses, whom he had known so long, and whom he had found so sweet a comfort in his hours of sorrow, an eternal farewell.

His health, however, remained good until a few days before his death. His legs first showed signs of weakness, and refused longer to support him. His memory also failed him, and he would often stop still in the midst of a sentence. When he was made aware of this, he was somewhat distressed, for his judgment remained unimpaired to the last, saying, "I am no longer capable of carrying on a conversation with my friends."

Brandt, to whom we are indebted for most of these interesting particulars concerning Vondel, and other friends cheered his last days with their visits. The poet, who now spent most of his waking hours by the cheerful blaze of his hearth, seemed to appreciate this very highly, and whenever they were about to leave, would tell them good-by with a hearty pressure of the hand. Here, too, came Antonides, that brilliant young poet, so untimely cut off, and the painter, Philip de Koning, both of whom the old bard admired greatly.

When in his ninetieth year he had himself taken to the houses of the two Burgomasters of the city, whom with broken words he begged to provide for his grandson Justus, who bore his name, and whose prospects, on account of his father's profligacy and his grandfather's poverty, were anything but promising. The city fathers comforted the poor old man with good words, and he returned to his corner by the hearth, never again to leave it alive.

"Old age," says Brandt, "was now his illness; the oil was lacking; the fire must go out." His limbs became cold and refused to be warmed. Referring to this a few days before his death, he remarked to Brandt, with a humorous twinkle in his large brown eyes: "You might give me this epitaph:

"Here in peace lies Vondel old; He died because he was so cold."

This was the old poet's last rhyme, surely an humble one for him whose lofty imagery and sublime conceptions are the wonder of his countrymen. He also said to his niece, Agnes Blok, "I do not long for death." She asked, "Do you not long for eternal life?" He replied: "Aye, I do long for that; but, like Elijah, I would fain fly thither." Though now he also began to say: "Pray for me that God will take me out of this life." And when those standing around his bedside asked: "Are you ready now for the terrible messenger to come?" he replied, "Aye, let him come; for, even though I wait longer, Elijah's chariot will not descend. I shall have to go in at the common gate."

After an illness of only eight days, on February 5, 1679, about half-past four in the morning, the old bard fell asleep. He seemed to be wholly free from pain, and died so softly that the friends who stood around his bedside scarcely observed it.

Vondel was aged ninety-one years, two months, and nineteen days. He was nearly double the age of the world's greatest dramatist, was seventeen years older than Euripides, and just as old as Sophocles.

Three days after his death he was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk--the Church of St. Catherine--at Amsterdam, not far from the choir. Fourteen poets were the pall-bearers who carried the great master to his last resting-place. Around his grave were the tombs of most of his literary friends of former years. Here lay Hooft and Barlæus and Tesselschade. Here, too, was the tomb of the noble de Ruyter, his country's most illustrious naval hero. Here, among this company of distinguished dead, among these sculptured busts and mediæval effigies, these monumental tombs and glorious cenotaphs, this greatest of all Hollanders was buried in a simple grave, unmarked by even an epitaph. Three years afterwards Joan Six, one of the Aldermen of the city, had the following time-verse (which gives the year of his death) engraved upon the stone:

TO THE OLDEST AND GREATEST POET. VIR PHŒBO ET MVSIS GRATVS VONDELIVS HIC EST VI MV I V V D LIV IC 6 1005 1 5 5 5005015 1100 ---- 1679

Shortly after his decease, Antonides, Vollenhove, and others of the younger poets also honored him with eulogies as the first poet of his age. To the pall-bearers a medallion was given, on one side of which was the image of the poet; on the other, a singing swan, with the year of Vondel's birth and death, and the inscription: "The oldest and greatest poet."

HIS PERSON AND CHARACTER.

Vondel was of medium height, with a figure well made and compact. His countenance was one of remarkable intelligence, and was characterized by an expression at once earnest and exalted.

In early life his face was pale and thin, but later, after the disappearance of his strange malady, it became broad and full, and of a healthful color, with glowing red cheeks. His forehead, not too high, was broad and commanding, a fit arsenal for those thunderbolts of invective that he knew so well how to employ. One of his eyebrows was slightly higher than the other. Beneath them glowed two deep brown eyes, large and penetrating--eagle eyes, full of fire, as if, naïvely says his biographer, "he had satires in his head." His nose was sensitive and somewhat large; his mouth of medium size, with rather thin lips. He usually wore his hair short, his ears only half covered. On his chin grew a small pointed beard, in early manhood a dark brown, later white with age. Altogether a figure striking and noble, if not grand and imposing--one that long acquaintance would only render the more impressive, for it was stamped with character. Thus the outward man! Would you learn the stature of his soul? Read his magnificent works.

Strange to say, he who was so full of thought and spirit in his writings was still and silent in the presence of others. Once when dining with Grotius, Vossius, and Barlæus--the three most learned men of the age--it is related that during the course of the whole meal the poet said not one word. He was usually grave and taciturn. When he did speak, however, he was intense and pointed.

He was ever modest in his deportment and temperate in his habits. Though living in an age of good fellowship and of royal tippling, when post-prandial drunkenness was the rule rather than the exception, he was never known to have indulged to excess. Like Dante, Milton, and Petrarch, furthermore, his private life was pure. Not one accuser ever threw mud at its whiteness.

His clothes, though in the fashion and in good taste, were always plain and unassuming. He enjoyed the society of artists and men of letters, learning, and judgment. He was extremely popular among his relatives, which speaks well for his heart, and is surely a good index to his true character.

Vondel was a true friend, and was ever ready to prove his devotion, if need be, by the sacrifice of blood and treasure. Such a romantic attachment as that of Dante for Beatrice was doubtless unknown to our poet. His was the more natural ardor of a deep-seated affection. Yet he had the capacity for suffering so characteristic of genius. We know that, like William III., he was profoundly affected by the death of his wife. For several years, indeed, he was in such a melancholy that his thoughts fell still-born from his pen. He wrote little, and destroyed all that he wrote. Life had lost all charms for him. He was, however, awakened from this reverie of sorrow by the bugle blast of war; and only in the roar of the conflict did he forget the sting of grief.

Vondel was in no sense a theologian, and had no patience with hair-splitting distinctions. Though a fervid Catholic, his toleration is shown by his remark that he would not "sit in the Inquisition as a judge of anyone's life."

"There were some hot-headed Papists," he said, "who persecuted the pious of other creeds. It is also true that the Papists of all time have sought to rule the consciences of men. However, some reformers are lately following in their footsteps." In regard to the wonderful legends of the early Church, he remarked that they were "monkish fables written in the dark ages for the ignorant people." That his Catholicism had not lessened his love for freedom or for his country his later poems bear excellent witness.

Though by his bitter lampoons and severe invective he had made many enemies during the course of his long career, yet his popularity is seen in the fact that his memory was honored by men of all creeds and parties. The Jesuits of Antwerp placed his portrait in their cloister among the most illustrious men of ancient and modern times.

He had gathered no riches with his poetry. On the contrary, his losses were far greater than his gains. The most costly gift ever given him was the golden locket and chain from her majesty Queen Christina of Sweden. This present was worth about two hundred dollars. Amelia von Solms, the widow of Frederic Henry, also honored him with a gold medal for a poem on the marriage of her daughter, the Princess Henrietta. For his ode on the dedication of the new Stadthuis, the authorities of Amsterdam honored him with a silver cup. The visiting Elector of one of the German States gave him, for some verses in his honor, "a small sixteen guldens." For his eulogy in honor of the Archbishop of Cologne, the city fathers allowed him thirty guldens.

His daughter Anna, dying before him, willed him her portion, which, with his pension, proved amply sufficient for his maintenance.

A few months before his death he had willed all of his books to a certain priest. Thinking that if they remained with him he might injure his feeble health by reading, he allowed them to be taken away. Afterwards, however, he bitterly regretted this, and, with tears in his eyes, complained to one of his friends that all of his treasures had been stolen, and that now nothing was left him.

In his youth his motto was: "Love conquers all things." Later he signed his productions with the word "Zeal," or "Justice"--the last a play on his name; sometimes, also, with the letters P.L., meaning _pro libertate_, or with the initials P.V.K.--"Palamedes of Kologne." In some of his works was to be seen a picture of David playing a harp, with the device "Justus fide vivit," to which, of course, could be given a double meaning: "The just man lives by faith," or "Justus lives by his lyre."

Vondel's diligence was phenomenal. Once he remarked in a letter to a friend that the height of Parnassus can only be attained by much panting and sweat, and that attention and exercise sharpen the intellect. The multitude and the excellence of his works prove the worth of his philosophy.

His thirst for knowledge was extraordinary, and he left few corners of that vast field unfilled. To learn the best expressions for each trade and profession he was wont to question all kinds and conditions of men in regard to the words that they used in their trade or calling. Farmers, carpenters, masons, artists, men of every business and profession added to his vocabulary. He thus built up the language, and himself attained a thorough mastery over his native tongue; one never equalled by any of his countrymen, with the possible exception of the poet Bilderdÿk.

He was, moreover, always ready to receive suggestions in regard to his own productions, and often read them to his friends to obtain the benefit of their criticism. This, however, was more true of his translations than of his originals. He took much pleasure, also, in praising the work of others, especially that of the younger poets.

That he was an excellent critic is shown by his prose essays, though he was too impressionable to beauty to be very severe. He was exceedingly modest in regard to his own powers. He considered Hooft the foremost among the Dutch writers of his age, not only on account of his sweet lyrics and stately tragedies, but also because of his historical works.

Constantine Huyghens he praised for his liveliness and fancy, his subtlety, and his wonderful versatility. He also thought highly of Anslo and de Dekker, and particularly of those two young giants, Vollenhove and Antonides. In "The Y Stream" of the latter he saw extraordinary promise, and he thenceforth called the younger poet his son, and was always most tender and fatherly towards him, taking much delight in his company. Of Vollenhove's "Triumph of Christ," he said: "There is a great light in that man, but it is a pity that he is a clergyman." Brandt he called "a good epigrammatist."

HIS FEELING FOR ART.

Art to Vondel was a revelation of the divine in man, and therefore the best promoter of virtue. Hence his passion for poetry, and his admiration for painting, music, and architecture. How fitting that he who sang the union of the arts:

"Blithe Poesy and Painting fair, Two sisters debonair,"

should be crowned "king of the feast" by a company of fellow artists!

Vondel was the painter's poet. He wrote numerous inscriptions for paintings. He praises Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Bassano, Giulo Romano, Lastman, Sandrart, Goltzius (the etcher), and Rubens. He apparently preferred the idealists of the Italian school, for he says but little about the realists of the day, Steen, Ostade, Brouwer, and Teniers; nor even concerning those who copied nature like Douw, De Hoogh, and Mutsu. The great Rembrandt he names but twice. In one place he speaks of the portrait of Cornelis Anslo, of which he tamely says, "The visible part is the least of him, and who would see Anslo must hear him." He seems to have been more impressed by the fine portrait of Anna Wymers, for he says: "Anna seems to be alive." Elsewhere, however, he speaks of "the night-owl, who hides himself from the day in his shadows of cobweb;" which is thought to be a covert reference to that magnificent study in chiaroscuro, Rembrandt's "Night Patrol." It is certain, however, that he did not realize the powerful genius of Holland's greatest artist.

Vondel, the admirer of the Italian classics, with their delicacy and regularity, probably could not appreciate the revolutionary splendors of this great magician. Nor is there any evidence to show that any friendship existed between these two men, each the undying glory of his country. And yet in some respects the poet and the painter were strikingly alike. Both were masters of style, and grandly daring and original. Both were in the highest sense creative, and dealt in tremendous effects, soaring from mountain-top of grandeur into the heaven of the sublime. Each was comprehensive and universal; each was a personified mood of his nation and the maker of an epoch. Each suffered poverty in old age.

Yet in one respect the painter had the advantage over the poet. He spoke the universal language of the eye, and thus his message has reached millions who were deaf to his tongue. The political obscurity, on the other hand, into which little Holland was plunged so soon after the meteoric blaze of her brief ascendancy, confined her language to her narrow territory; and Vondel, equally worthy with Rembrandt of the admiration of the world, became a sealed book save to his countrymen. The former, however, was the very life of his time, its recognized voice; the latter was in his life neglected, to become after his death the most illustrious of his race, a name to conjure an age out of obscurity.

Rubens, on the other hand, the poet fully appreciated. In the dedication of his drama, "The Brothers," 1639, he calls the great Fleming "the glory among the pencils of our age."

Music, we know, had a powerful fascination for our poet. He himself played the lute, while his poetry throbs with the very heart of melody. How lovingly he speaks of the divine art of song, that "charms the soul out of the body, filling it with rare delight--a foretaste of the bliss of the angels"!

How keen must have been his enjoyment when at Muiden he heard the lovely singers of that age--the gifted Tesselschade on her guitar, or the talented harpist, Christina van Erp; or when in his home in the Warmoesstraat he heard the patriotic chimes of his beloved city pealing the lingering hours into oblivion! How profoundly, too, must his deep, earnest soul have been stirred by the grandeur of the Psalms, rising on the wings of Zweling's noble melodies to the vaulted arches of the old cathedral where he was wont to worship!

HIS FEELING FOR NATURE.

The attitude of a poet toward nature is always of peculiar and absorbing interest. Is it because she is the perpetual fount of ideals, because of her voiceless sympathy with his ever-changing mood, or because her grandeur and loveliness have power to move the deeps of his soul? However it be, the poets have almost without exception found her the source of their inspiration.

Into her rude confessional they pour the unreserved tale of sorrows that no man can understand; and she gently whispers peace. At her feet they lay the guilty story of a soul; the love, the passions of a heart; the joys, the pains, the riotous thoughts of life; and she gently whispers peace. And here, too, Vondel opened his heart, and here he also obtained comfort for the vexing ills of life.

It has been said that man's appreciation of the beauties of nature is proportioned to the degree of his cultivation. In the ruder ages in Holland, as in Germany, the mysterious forces of the physical world and their various manifestations became personified in the good and bad genii of the Teutonic mythology. In proportion as the worship of these genii ceased, nature became appreciated for its own sake. It had first to be divested of the fear-inspiring supernatural. To this Christianity and the accumulating discoveries in science largely contributed.

Karel van Mander first introduced this feeling into painting; and Hendrik Spieghel, into literature. And then came Hooft and Vondel, who in this respect, as in all else, stood far above their contemporaries.

Vondel's enjoyment of nature is not so keen as that of Hooft, but it is far deeper and stronger, and grew steadily to the end of his life. Now and then his descriptions remind one of the brooding landscapes of the "melancholy Ruysdael;" at other times of the creations of Lingelbach and Pynacker, in those striking scenes where Dutch realism and Italian fancy are oddly combined.

Under the influence of Seneca and Du Bartas, according to the artificial fashion of the day, he at first employed high-sounding mythological names as symbols for the things themselves; but he soon outgrew this classical affectation. Already in his "Palamedes," especially in the chorus of "Eubeers," is this feeling for nature apparent. This charming bucolic is the picture of a Dutch landscape. Elsewhere we have mentioned its resemblance to the "L'Allegro" of Milton.

Like the bard of Avon, our poet saw but little of the world. Twice he made a business trip to Denmark, and shortly before his death he paid a visit to Cologne. In addition to this, he made several inland journeys--one to the Gooi:

"Where the grand oak so thickly grows Beyond rich fields, where buckwheat glows."

To Vondel truly "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." All of his poems, particularly the "Lucifer," are studded with figures of the stars.

The poet drew many of his figures, too, from animal life, as the beasts and the birds in the sustained Virgilian similes in the "Lucifer." What can be more exquisite, also, than his verses on the tame sparrow of the lovely Susanne Bartelot, in the style of the "Passer, deliciæ suæ puellæ" of Catullus?

The north wind he calls "a winter-bird, so cold and rough." The spring is his delight. He is glad when he sees men busy fishing, planting, and hunting, and engaged in all manner of bucolic occupations. In the Norway pines unloaded on the River Y, he sees a forest of masts from which the tricolor of his dear country will be unfurled in every clime.

Would you know his capacity for aesthetic symbolism? Read his superb ode to the Rhine.

Flowers were to him the beautiful symbols of equally beautiful moral truths. What a world of pathos in his voice where he says of Mary Queen of Scots:

"O! Roman Rose, cut from her bleeding stem!"

And where he speaks of the mournful rosemary in the death-wreath of his little daughter Saartje! For little Maria, his darling grand-child, he wishes "a winding sheet of flowers--of violets white and red and purple, blue and yellow." In the garlands of his fancy he ever weaves the blooms of his delight, lilies, violets, roses--white and red--and his national flower, the glorious tulip.

He loved the open heaven and the airy freedom of solitude. "The welkin wide is mine," he says, and like a wild bird adds, "and mine the open sky." He loved the woods, where his ears were caressed by "the blithe echoes of the careless birds."

Long before Shelley he sang of the lark, "wiens keeltje steiltjes steigert" ("whose throat so steeply soars"). Long before Keats he was thrilled by the deep-toned nightingale.

"The shrill-voiced nightingale, Who at thy casement bower Pours out his breathless tale,"

reminds him of the questioning soul at the window of eternity," peering through panes on darkness unconfined." Then, again, he likens himself to a nightingale, caged for days in the mournful cold, that bursts into a rapturous melody to see the warm sun melt away the gloom.

His soul communed with nature in her deepest and quietest moods. The peaceful meadow, the calm beauty of the woods, the forest-crowned mountains, the tumultuous sea were all the themes of his song.

Though his feeling for nature was not so fine nor so intense as that of some of the later poets, yet it was deeper and truer. In the world around him he saw but a reflection of the grander world beyond.

Nor was the pantheistic conception strange to him. See the first chorus of the "Lucifer," where he calls God "the soul of all we can conceive;" and the second act, where he speaks of:

"----the farthest rounds And endless circles of eternity, That, from the bounds of time and space set free, Revolve unceasingly around one God, Who is their centre and circumference.

How like the pantheism of Spinoza, first proclaimed some years later!

HIS PATRIOTISM.

Would you know him as a patriot? Hear his splendid tones of jubilation over the victory of his countrymen--a victory where truth and freedom triumphed. Hear his fine odes celebrating the commerce and the progress of the growing commonwealth. Listen to his bursts of patriotism in his "Orange May Song," and where he calls the ancient Greek sea-galleys, "child's play beside ours."

Vondel was a representative Dutchman, and there was a strong national stamp on all that he did. He was a grand type of the burgher of the great Dutch middle class, which has ever been the glory of the Netherlands, and which has given to the world such an illustrious array of soldiers, painters, scholars, poets, and statesmen. In reading him we are continually reminded that we are in the land of dykes and windmills. Thus all of his heroes are invested with Holland dignities. We hear of burghers, burgomasters, and stadtholders; of the dunes, the sea, the dams, the strand, and the green, fertile meadows. Wherever the scene of the play, we always recognize the streets, the canals, the houses, the palaces, and the environs of Amsterdam. This was not due to a lack of historical information, as was the case with Shakespeare, but because the poet desired to bring the truth closer to the hearts of his hearers. The fact, too, that this made the scenic requirements of a play considerably less, thus reducing the expense of presentation, might also have had some influence.

Vondel, furthermore, when representing the past, never forgot the present. It was ever before his eyes. Hence many of his plays were political allegories, and were significant for their bearing upon the time.

The one universal characterization of all of his work, one that glows in every poem, is his love of freedom--the ruling passion of his countrymen. Already in the "Passover "--his first tragedy, written at the age of twenty-six--we hear his cry, "O! sweetest freedom." Soon afterwards, in his lyrics and in "Palamedes," he showed his strong sympathy with Oldenbarneveldt; and during the bitter persecution that followed, when he was forced to fly like a hunted beast from house to house, this spirit grew by the opposition that it fed upon into a fierce blaze, only quenched by death.

Like the Father of Tuscan literature, his thoughts were ever attuned to the spirit of his age. Like Dante, too, he was ever in the heart of the battle. Like him, also, he was not worldly wise, and was naturally of a rebellious temperament. He was himself in perpetual revolt. This was due, however, not to a saturnine disposition, but to a keen sense of justice, and to the idealism of a lofty, cultivated mind. To compel the age to conform to the measure of his own conceptions he often found procrustean methods necessary. Hence his stern aggressiveness against wrong.

He fain would have sat apart in silent contemplation, but he was destined to know neither the Olympic calm of Goethe, nor the sublime serenity of Shakespeare. "The life of the day, like an octopus, grasped him and would not let him go." He drank in the wine of freedom, and his soul was filled with the hunger of strife. His cry now became a battle-cry. Wherever he saw wrong and injustice--and his eyes were ever open--he donned his armor and dealt crushing blows for the cause of the oppressed. Earnest, still, and passionate, great of soul and impressionable of heart, the poet was a born fighter. His whole life was a polemic against tyranny.

His dear fatherland was the alpha and omega of his inspiration, and he was, perhaps, the first Dutchman who deeply felt the consciousness of national power. The next object of his soul's affection was his city, Amsterdam, whose glories he never grew tired of singing. His characterization:

"The town of commerce, Amsterdam, Known round the circle of the globe,"

might not improperly be reflected upon its new and yet more powerful namesake in the New World, of whose grandeur he might well be deemed the prophet, when, in his "Gysbrecht," with patriotic eloquence he pictures the Amsterdam of the coming centuries. What though the ruling trident has departed from the "Venice of the North," her peerless daughter, far across the seas, yet holds triumphant sway!

In his fiery patriotism Vondel much reminds us of Milton. He also was at heart a zealous republican, though he had a Christian's unshaken reverence for the anointed kings of earth, and for what he thought a God-constituted authority. Hence the "Lucifer," and his relentless opposition to the regicides of England and to Cromwell, "that murderer without God and shame, who dared to desecrate and to assault the Lord's anointed," as he says bitterly in one of his polemics.

Like the great Englishman, the Hollander was also a good hater; and he never spared what he hated. Though charitable, he was uncompromising, and forgave not easily; always, however, deprecating the excesses of the "root and branch" zealots of his own party. Just as Milton, after having joined the Presbyterians, forsook them when they in turn began to persecute the followers of other creeds, so, too, Vondel left the Remonstrants when they crossed the jealous line of freedom.

We are indeed inclined to believe that his strongest trait was his love of justice, which caused him to oppose tyranny under every guise, and to stigmatize the faults of his own church and party with expletives as crushing as those that he hurled against his enemies.

Thus his hatred of the Catholic Spaniards and of the Dutch Gomarists. The bloody persecution of the one was in his eyes no worse than the oppressive hypocrisy of the other. Even his beloved House of Orange drew from him the bitterest opposition when, in Prince Maurice and in William II., it threatened the liberty of his country and the privileges of his beloved Amsterdam. Of him it may truly be said that his eyes were never blinded by party prejudice.

Milton, in an immortal sonnet, blew a trumpet-blast of vengeance for the slaughtered Piedmontese. Why was that trumpet silent w hen his own party perpetrated a similar massacre at Drogheda? Vondel was, indeed, far more magnanimous than his great English contemporary. He had more of "the milk of human kindness."

How strong is our poet's admiration for the founders of the Republic, the fathers of the "golden age," and for that grand race of intrepid discoverers, pioneers, and explorers that pierced every corner of the globe! How, too, flames his soul with pride, when he recounts the brave deeds of those old sea-lions, Tromp and de Ruyter, and their fearless companions, in the fierce battle against the growing English supremacy! Not one of those heroes whom he did not crown with the wreath of an immortal eulogy!

Yet Vondel, even as Dante, was at heart a man of peace. Like his countrymen, he never sought the fray; but when battle was forced upon him, it meant a fight to the death. All his fighting was for peace. In one of his poems he speaks of peace as:

"A treasure--Ah! its worth unknown, Surpassing far a triumph in renown."

Elsewhere he says, "The olive more than laurel pleases me." He never forgot the high seriousness of his mission. He never lost sight of the dignity of Christian manhood.

Vondel was in a large sense also the poet of Christendom; a crusader, with his face ever towards the New Jerusalem, throned in ethereal splendors. He felt himself a member of that large Christian alliance that Henry IV. wished to found as a barrier against the encroachments of the Turk, the arch-foe of Christendom.

"He comes--the Turk! We stand with winged arms,"

he shouts in one of his poems. Yet he never forgot to pray, also, that the erring ones, both Jew and Gentile, might be brought into the fold of the "true Church."

HIS VIEWS ON LIFE.

Of particular interest are the views of so old and so profound a seer on life; for every poet has his scheme of life. What men call genius is, indeed, only the faculty of seeing life through the prism of a temperament, and the poets are preëminently the men of temperament. Vondel, with his earnest, sincere nature, out of the bewildering chaos of his environment soon evolved his own philosophy of existence. "Life, that sad tragedy," the youthful poet calls it in his "Passover." To him already life was a passing pageant, and man, an exile. His epitome of the world's history, moreover, is not unlike the celebrated epigram of Rhÿnvis Feith, another Dutch poet:

"Man, like a withered leaf, falls in oblivion's wave. We are, and fade away--the cradle and the grave; Between them flits a dream, a drama of the heart; Smart yields his place to Joy, and Joy again to Smart; The monarch mounts his throne; the slave bows to the floor; Death breathes upon the scene--the players are no more."

His gaze, like Milton's, was ever upward, through the prison-bars of time, into the unconfined vast of eternity. His tone, too, was most glorious when singing "celestial things."

How like the voice of a Hebrew prophet his note of warning, where he cries:

"Batavians, repent; Think of Tyre and Sidon. Repent as the Ninevites! O! mourn your sins!"

And after all this painful revelry of life, this lust of action, and the battle's roar, it is a "haven sweet and still" that his earth-tormented soul longs for. How softly he whispers after his fiery trumpet tones are done:

"O! help me, O my God, to give my life to thee, My fragile self, my will, my little all. Let me, O thou beyond compare! O source of everything! In praises rich and deep thy matchless glory sing!"

In the pensive twilight of old age, he grew more and more conscious of the true everlasting, and his patriotism became the all-embracing one of the "fatherland above." He now began to look forward with child-like faith to the revelations of the resurrection, though not forgetting that:

"The infant of eternity Must first be cradled in the tomb;"

but believing that from the cerements of mystery shall break a light to lead the soul to heaven.

HIS PLACE AND ART.

Vondel, to an extraordinary degree, possessed that keen insight into human nature which is the first requisite of the great satirist. He was the Juvenal of his time. Though his wit is never delicate nor keen, it is, however, sweeping and irresistible. His was no gentle zephyr of irony to tickle the tender cuticle of a supersensitive age, but a very cyclone of mockery to laugh a thick-skinned generation out of folly.

His poetry is ever the instrument of exaltation; and though in its condemnation of evil it often by its directness and frankness gives some offense to the delicate edge of our modern refinement, it is never indecently coarse; it is never a pander to vice.

Indignation more intense, scorn more contemptuous, satire more powerful, invective more tremendous than that glowing in the polemics of this great satirist have never struck fear into the hardened hearts of the wicked. Few men have been so hated; few have been so loved.

Yet the sublime is the true field of this poet, and sublimer thoughts than his were surely never spoken. The grandeur of Job, the glory of the Psalms, and the splendor of the Apocalypse are all to be found in his magnificent Biblical tragedies, that noble series commencing with the "Jerusalem Desolate" of his untried youth, and ending with the "Noah" of his octogenarian ripeness.

The influence of the Bible on his art was prodigious. The Holy Writ was the inexhaustible quarry from which he hewed his master, pieces; throughout whose development may be traced the growth of a human soul. See his paraphrase of the Psalms, if you would know his enjoyment of the serene beauty of holiness.

The artistic truth of all his creations is seen in their elemental objectivity--the portrayal by vivid flashes of feeling and by artful representation of the ever-during and imperishable. In most of his dramas is the sublimity of Æschylus with the fine proportion and the directness of Sophocles. In others, as in the "Leeuwendalers," where he sings the triumph of peace, is the sweetness and the feminine strength of Euripides.

Of Vondel it has truly been said: "_Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit_;" for to beauty--

"God's handmaid, Beauty, Whose touch rounds A dew-drop or a world"--

he ever paid the incense of a passionate devotion.

"Æschylus does right without knowing it," said Sophocles; even so Vondel possessed an unerring instinct for the true; ever stringing the jewelled beads of fancy on the golden thread of truth.

Like Æschylus, too, he was at heart a lyric poet; yet who shall say that in his character delineation, in the sweeping energy of his action, and in the management of his plot, he was not almost equally as admirable?

Like Dryden, Vondel rose very slowly to the stature of his full power. All of his dramas preceding the "Lucifer" show this gradual development; all of those that come later maintain the same standard of excellence.

Like Goethe, the Dutch poet exerted an ennobling influence on the theatre of his country. Like Dante, he was fond of a strong, bold outline, and always chose a direct rather than a circuitous route. Like Shakespeare, he was a keen observer of affairs, a student of life. His works are the rimed chronicles of his age. His was a transcendent genius, not oppressed by excessive culture, and with the creative ever the ruling instinct. To him poetry was the divinest of the arts. It became the ritual of his soul's worship; duty, beauty, and religion were the three strings on his melodious lyre.

His works abound in little scholasticism. Pedantry and affectation were his abomination; pith and vigor, directness and comprehensiveness, the radical elements of his strength. In his works we find a harvest of such glorious themes as store the granary of poet minds; we see everywhere evidences of power. We are ever startled by:

"The lightning flash of an immortal thought, The rolling thunder of a mighty line."

Vondel's similes are more striking than his metaphors; there is a sustained glow in his imagery. In this respect, also, he shows the Oriental bent of his genius. This is furthermore seen in his personification of the elements of nature and of the stars and constellations, as in the "Lucifer," which gives a barbaric splendor to the play. Few poets, indeed, in any literature, contain such splendid and elevated images.

He, too, could woo discordant sounds to harmony, and wove the consonantal Dutch into mellow meshes of ensnaring sound. A nobleness not devoid of grace, a sublimity not austere, but warm with human sympathy; a manner more remarkable for chaste strength and a rugged symmetry of form than for delicacy or elegance--these are some of the characteristics of his style.

Not for him the sweet felicities of the mincing phraser or the dreamy languors of the riming troubadour. Not for him the gaysome zephyr or the dim, romantic moon. He is ever on the serene altitude of lofty contemplation, or in the valley, battling like a god. He is always deeply serious. He is everywhere sincere. His is the whirlwind and the storm; the noonday glare and the midnight gloom. His is the eagle's bold, epic flight and the lark's wild, lyric soar. No nightingale of sentiment trills her dulcet serenade amid the forest of his song. And yet who can be more tender and affecting, who more truly, softly sweet? All is virile; nothing is effeminate. All is manly, healthful, pure. There is no morbid fever of a brain diseased and foul. There is no pale, misleading will-o'-the-wisp of a heart decayed and bad. There is freshness, there is beauty, there is truth. "Magnificent" is the one word for his manner, "the grand style" of the Netherlands.

His was the sombre Occidental imagination fired with the splendor of the Orient. His poetry is a Gothic cathedral, grand, towering, and impressive, typical at once of the massive ruggedness of the oak and the severe sublimity of the Alp; a Teutonic temple, in whose cloistered corridors we hear the majestic sweep of unseen angels' wings, while the glorious symphony of harps and psalteries, played by countless cherubim, mingling with the rich bass of the organ and the ethereal tenor of invisible choristers, rolls like a flood of celestial harmony through all the deep diapason from heaven to hell.

The word "vondel" in the Brabantian dialect means a "little bridge," which suggests a not inapt analogy; for it was Vondel who bridged the chasm between the crude Mystery and Miracle Plays of the Chambers of Rhetoric, and the "Lucifer," a drama unequalled in the history of Dutch literature. Between the dead abstractions of the Chambers and the warm, concrete life of the sublime Vondelian drama, even as between "Gorboduc" and "Hamlet," lay the experience of one soul.

Hooft, like Heiberg in Denmark and Lessing in Germany, instituted a revolution in the world of taste. But Vondel, even more than Hooft, developed the latent powers of the tongue, enlarged its resources, and fixed its form. His is still the noblest of Dutch diction, possessing that strange virility that defies time.

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.

L.C.v.N.

The "Lucifer."

"Away, away, into the shadow-land, Where Myth and Mystery walk hand in hand; Where Legend cons her half-forgotten lore, And Sphinx and Gorgon throng the silent shore."

THE PARADISE HISTORY.

The Paradise history, as solving the problem of the origin of man and the origin of evil, and as foreshadowing the goal of human destiny, has always been a subject of universal concern; one full of fascination for the imagination of the poet. Few subjects, indeed, have aroused such widely diffused and long sustained interest.

Beginning with the "Creation" of the Spanish monk Dracontius, the Biblical paraphrases of the old English poet Cædmon, and the Latin poem of Avitus, Bishop of Vienna, we see, at different periods, various studies of this absorbing theme, especially in Italy, where a score or more poets and essayists made it the source of their inspiration.

Perhaps the most noted of these was Andrieni (1578-1652), who wrote the "Adamo," a tragedy in five acts, whose subject is the fall of man. This drama, however, is a rather crude affair, such allegorical abstractions as Death, Sin, and Despair being the chief characters.

About the same period, strange to say, the Netherland imagination, not long awakened from its medieval torpor, also became fired with this theme. The youthful Grotius was the first to attempt it in his "Adamus Exul," a Latin drama of considerable merit. This was in 1601, several years before the "Adamo" of Andrieni. Two other Dutchmen of the same generation, both far greater poets than Grotius, were also attracted by this subject. One was the distinguished Father Cats in his idyll, "The First Marriage;" the other was Justus van den Vondel in his "Lucifer."

We would, in passing, call attention to the curious coincidence that so many poets of so many different nations, most of them doubtless without knowledge of the others, should about the same time have chosen this subject of such historical and symbolical importance. For besides the poets mentioned were many others: the Scotchman Ramsay, the Spaniard de Azevedo, the Portuguese Camoens, the Frenchman Du Bartas, and two Englishmen, Phineas Fletcher and John Milton. A more remarkable instance of telepathy is not, we believe, on record.

Of all of the works of the many authors who have treated this theme, only two, however, have withstood the critical test of time; only two have been awarded the palm of immortality. These two are Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Vondel's "Lucifer": the former, the grandest of English epics; the latter, the noblest of Dutch dramas. It is the "Lucifer" that we have been asked to discuss.

DID MILTON BORROW FROM VONDEL?

The "Lucifer" was published thirteen years before "Paradise Lost." The scheme of the English poem had, however, already been crystallized in the mind of its author for fifteen years. This scheme originally contemplated a drama, which the poet's powerful imagination gradually developed into an epic.

To whom Vondel was indebted for the foundation of his tremendous drama is easily ascertained. He himself mentions his authorities in his admirable and learned preface. Among these were, besides the Holy Writ, the various Church Fathers, the "Adamus Exul" of Grotius, the work of Du Bartas, and a treatise on the fallen angels, by the English Protestant, Richard Baker. His own imagination, however, soared far above the fundamental hints that he received from any of these works on the subject, so that the "Lucifer" is rightly considered one of the most original and comprehensive poems in literature.

To whom Milton was indebted for the idea of his great epic is, on the other hand, not so easy to discover, although generation after generation of critics have thrown upon this problem the searchlight of innumerable essays.

That the "Paradise Lost" is scintillant with many of the brightest gems in the crown of the Greek and Latin classics is apparent even at a cursory reading. That it is also studded with poetic paraphrases of many modern authors has often been asserted.

However, the opportunity for originality was colossal, and Milton's imagination proved equal to the task. The conception of "Paradise Lost" alone makes it the grandest work of the imagination of modern times.

That the English poet occasionally borrowed a thought or a sentence can not be doubted. Besides, he had a wonderful memory, long and tenacious, which involuntarily emptied its gatherings into the flow of his thought and into the stream of his discourse. That this was not always done unconsciously is known from Milton's own confession, where he says: "To borrow and to better in the borrowing is no plagiarie." And that he bettered in the borrowing who can doubt? All that he touched turned to gold; all that he thought came out transfigured. In the alembic of his genius truth became beauty; the mortal, the immortal.

As the "Lucifer" and the "Paradise Lost" are both concerning the same subject, and as they are both founded upon the Biblical account of the creation, it is but natural that they should have much in common. A comparison of the two poems, therefore, we feel sure would bring to light some striking and curious resemblances and many equally strong and remarkable contrasts.

As such comparison would expand this article beyond the prescribed limits, we must leave it to the reader himself. Nor should he, for one instant, forget the fundamental difference between the drama and the epic.

The epic may wander through the dales of Arcady, along description's slow, meandering way, to pluck the roses of beauty and the lilies of sentiment there growing in so sweet abundance. The drama, with vigorous step and bold, unerring eye, pursues a straight path to the mountain-top of its climax, whence, with increasing momentum, it plunges down to its awful catastrophe. It is the difference between narration and action.

We shall have to content ourselves, therefore, by a brief reference to those who have already given this matter their attention.

That Milton was under great obligations to Vondel's drama has been maintained by Dutch men of letters for generations. It has also become the contention of several distinguished English critics. Even as far back as 1825 the poet Beddoes, in a review of "Hayley's Life and Letters" (_Quarterly Review_, vol. xxxi.), says: "An effect which has hitherto not been noticed was then produced by the Dutch poets. In their school Joshua Sylvester (who lived amongst them) learnt some of the peculiarities of his versification; and if Milton was incited by the perusal of any poem upon the same subject to compose his 'Paradise Lost,' it was by studying the 'Lucifer' and 'Adam in Ballingschap' of Vondel, for he tried his strength with the same great poet in the 'Samson Agonistes;' Vondel being, indeed, the only contemporary with whom he would not have felt it a degradation to vie."

Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in a brilliant essay entitled "Milton and Vondel," was, we believe, the first Englishman who gave the subject conscientious study.

For this, on account of his knowledge of the difficult Dutch language, he was peculiarly fitted. Mr. Gosse, in his own interesting manner, tells how, during the seventeenth century, the Dutch, then one of the most vigorous languages of Europe, was much more studied than it is to-day; how the patriot Puritan, Roger Williams, having learned the language in Holland during his exile there, taught it to John Milton, then Cromwell's Latin secretary; how Milton also must have heard of the great fame of the "Lucifer," and of the storm of fanatical opposition that greeted its publication, from some of the Dutch diplomats whom it was his place to entertain; how, too, he could hardly have been ignorant of the name of the distinguished author of the drama, since it is known that he was well acquainted with Hugo Grotius, who was a warm admirer and the bosom friend of Vondel.

In addition to these and other reasons, Mr. Gosse then brings forward a plausible array of internal evidence, showing many points of similarity in the construction and in the treatment of the two poems, summing up with the conclusion that Milton was undoubtedly under considerable obligation to his great Dutch contemporary.

Rev. George Edmundson, M.A., of Middlesex, England, a graduate of Oxford, in a scholarly and painstaking work of two hundred pages, entitled "Milton and Vondel--a Literary Curiosity," next took up the subject, carrying the comparison not only into these two poems, but into all the works of Milton and into several others of Vondel.

Mr. Edmundson also discovered many wonderful coincidences and innumerable parallelisms in phrase and in imagery. Inspired with the motto, _Suum cuique honorem_, he has woven a tissue of most ingenious arguments to prove that Milton borrowed assiduously from the "Lucifer," the "Adam," the "Samson," and other works of Vondel.

Mr. Vance Thompson, in the New York _Musical Courier_ of December 15, 1897, has also added some interesting data to the subject.

With all the conclusions of these gentlemen we are not yet, however, prepared to agree. It is true we have not given the matter the comparative study that they have given it. We would wait, therefore, until we had thought more deeply about it before expressing our final opinion. However, we believe that a critical and impartial comparison of the two masterpieces will neither detract from the glory of Milton nor dim the grandeur of Vondel.

THE SCENE OF THE PLAY.

"Lucifer" is not the story "of man's first disobedience," though this is the outcome of the catastrophe. It is the drama of the fall of the angels. Yet man is the one subject of contention. Our first parents are, therefore, kept in the logical background of cause and effect. The creation of Adam, his bliss and his growing eminence, were the prime cause of the angelic conspiracy. The two-fold effect of the revolt was to the rebellious angels loss of Heaven, and to Adam loss of Eden.

Vondel, moreover, follows the doctrines of certain theologians that Christ would have become man even had Adam not sinned. Like Milton, he measures the scene of his heroic action with "the endless radius of infinitude," and by the artful use of terrestrial analogies conveys to the reader that idea of incomprehensible vastness that the transcendent nature of the subject demands. Vondel is, indeed, even more vague; the drama not giving opportunity for detailed description. Both are a wonderful contrast to the minute visual exactness of Dante.

The attempt to reconcile the spiritual qualities of the divine world with the physical properties of this, necessarily introduces some unavoidable incongruities. How can a material conception of the immaterial be given save through the symbols of the real! How else can the unknown be ascertained save through the equation of the known! How else, save by visual and sensuous images, express such impalpable thought!

"Thus measuring things in Heaven by things on earth,"

the poet gives us a finite picture of the infinite; a picture which yet, by means of shadowy outlines and an artistic vagueness, impresses us with the awful sublimity of the illimitable and eternal. The physical immensity of the poem is unsurpassed.

Humanized gods and Titanic passions shadowed by fate upon the immaculate canvas of sacred legend--this is the play. The personality of the author is never seen; yet when we know the man and his life, we cannot but see therein the reflex of his own experience. The scene is in Heaven and never leaves it. When actions occur elsewhere, they are described.

Infinities above the scene of contention, far beyond "Heaven's blazing archipelagoes," where no imagination dares to soar, reigns He

"Before whose face The universe with its eternity Is but a mote, a moment poised in space."

There

"Stand the hidden springs of life revealed, The wondrous mechanism from earth concealed. There Nature's primal premises appear In simple grandeur, deep and crystal clear, Flowing from out the heart of boundless ocean Of the eternal Now. With rapt devotion A myriad ministering forces there await The summons of His awful eyes of fate, The mandates of His all-compelling voice."

Far, far below those empyrean vaults is Earth, with its pristine inhabitants. God and man--the Creator and the thing created, the First Cause and the last effect--are both judiciously only introduced into the drama by hearsay.

Deep in the vague immensity lies Chaos, the uninhabited, through which the vanquished rebels are to be hurled to their endless doom.

But the poet also takes us

"Where meteors glare and stormy glooms invest;"

as, leaving Elysium's fields of light, he views

"Hell's punishments and horrors dire, Its gulfs of woe and lakes of rayless fire, Where demons laugh and fiends and furies rage Round writhing victims whose parched tongues assuage No cooling drops of hope."

Such is the grand perspective from the scene of this stupendous drama.

THE PEACEFUL JOYS OF PARADISE.

The play opens as softly as the opening strains of some grand oratorio. The first act is largely descriptive, a picture of the beautiful serenity of Heaven and of the joys of Paradise.

Belzebub, the second devil, first comes on the scene, and, as he stands upon those "heights flushed in creation's morn," by means of a few words, vibrant with suggestion and of far-reaching import, he at once gives us the key to the opening situation, indicating the relative positions of the two chief personages of the drama--the antithesis of Lucifer and Adam.

Apollion has been sent below to gain some tidings of the new race of earth. With speedy wings he soars back through the blue crystalline and past the wondering spheres, bearing a golden bough laden with choice fruit, that apple sweet whose juice is wine of destiny. He is brimming with enthusiasm over the wonders that he has just witnessed.

Belzebub, who has been anxiously awaiting his return, listens intently to his glowing description of the beauty of Eden and its primal innocence, occasionally interrupting with exclamations of wonder. Question after question suggests itself to his excited imagination. At first he is aflame with curiosity, then jealousy begins to tincture his ardor, and his admiration soon changes into mockery.

Apollion then describes the primeval pair and their unalloyed bliss, and confesses that in the delightful blaze of Eve's charms his snowy wings were singed. Indeed, to curb his increasing desire, he covered his eyes with both hands and wings. Even when godlike resolution had impelled him to return on high, he thrice turned back a lingering gaze towards the more than seraphic beauty of the first woman. Far sweeter than even the music of the spheres, those nightingales of space, is this most beautiful note in the song of creation!

Indescribably delicate is his account of the joys of that first marriage:

"And then he kissed His bride and she her bridegroom--thus on joy Their nuptials fed, on feasts of fiery love, Better imagined far than told--a bliss Divine beyond all angel ken;"

adding, with exquisite pathos,

"How poor Our loneliness; for us no union sweet Of two-fold sex--of maiden and of man-- Alas! how much of good we miss; we know No mate or happy marriage in a Heaven Devoid of woman."

With Belzebub, that mighty spirit severely masculine, it is the growing power of the new race that furnishes food for thought and ground for an ulterior motive. The prospect of human rivalry impresses him far more than the description of a happiness to which the sexless angels must ever be strangers. His soul is keyed in a grander, more passionless mood. Apollion, however, cannot forget this charming vision of idyllic joy. He repeats the same enchanting strain again and again. He even forgets to answer his chief's questions, and returns to the same fascinating theme in:

"Their life consists Alone in loving and in being loved-- One sweet, one mutual joy, by them indulged Perpetually, yet e'er unquenchable."

In this masterly manner the two controlling motives of the play, the envy of man's power, and the jealousy of human happiness, are seen to originate. The latter, however, is soon merged into the former, for Apollion, failing to elicit sympathy with his tenderer emotions, begins to sympathize with the more heroic mood of Belzebub, and even attempts to inflame it by artful suggestion.

The Archangel Gabriel, "The Herald from the towering Throne of Thrones," now approaches, with all the choristers of Heaven, to unfold the last divine decree.

From the mouth of his golden trumpet fall the silvery tones of peace. With jubilant tongue he praises the glorious attributes of the Deity and the boundless beneficence of the Godhead. In yet grander strain he prophesies the ascent of man,

"Who shall mount up by the stairway of the world, The firmament of beatific light Within, into the ne'er-created glow:"

and foretells the future incarnation of the Son of God, who, "on his high seat in his unshadowed Realm," shall judge both men and angels.

Here the chorus, after the manner of the antique drama, bursts into a line of pious affirmation. Gabriel then continues his address in a sterner tone. Obedience to the divine command, and honor to the new race is henceforth the bounden duty of the angelic hosts. Then follows a description of the three hierarchies of Heaven, founded upon the doctrine of the Church Fathers, ending with an eloquent iteration of the divine command. As yet all is serene. Even those spirits who soon shall unfurl the black banner of rebellion in that "virgin realm of peace" are yet unaware that within their breasts slumbers a passion that, awaking, will fill those holy courts with the tumultuous discord of revolt.

The ringing echoes of Gabriel's clarion trumpet have scarcely died away, when, throughout the clear hyaline, millions of angelic choristers burst into that sublime hymn of praise--that "anthem sung to harps of gold "--the grandest ever penned:

"Who is it on His Throne, high-seated?"

Triumphant songs and glad hosannahs now float down those "arching voids of empyrean stair." "All that pleaseth God is well" is the devout conclusion of this splendid outburst of celestial praise. Harmony re-echoes harmony; and with this glorious ode of jubilation the act comes to an end.

THE CLOUD OF CONSPIRACY.

In the second act, the protagonist first comes on the scene, like a god,

"With thunder shod, Crowned with the stars, and with the morning stoled."

He has until now been artfully kept in the background. Drawn by fire-winged cherubim, he sweeps into view, and voices, in no uncertain tone, his dissatisfaction with the divine decree.

Gabriel, the angel of revelation, is with admirable art now placed over against the Stadtholder. Lucifer would argue--would know the exact nature of Heaven's last decree. Gabriel, however, merely replies to his eager questioning with a dignified affirmation of God's command, and departs, leaving the divine injunction behind.

Belzebub, with untiring malignity, now prods the wounded pride of the fiery Stadtholder, and Lucifer again and again blazes into the most intense and bitter defiance. Listen to this speech, seething with the soul of rebellion:

"Now swear I by my crown upon this chance To venture all, to raise my seat amid The firmament, the spheres, the splendor of The stars above. The Heaven of Heavens shall then My palace be; the rainbow be my throne; The starry vast, my court; while down beneath, The Earth shall be my foot-stool and support; I shall, then swiftly drawn through air and light, High-seated on a chariot of cloud, With lightning-stroke and thunder grind to dust Whate'er above, around, below doth us Oppose, were it God's Marshal grand himself; Yea, e'er we yield, these empyrean vaults, Proud in their towering masonry, shall burst, With all their airy arches, and dissolve Before our eyes; this huge and joint-racked earth Like a misshapen monster lifeless lie; This wondrous universe to chaos fall, And to its primal desolation change. Who dares, who dares defy great Lucifer?"

Surely the spirit of revolt never found fiercer and more poetical expression! Surely more eloquent and stupendous daring was never uttered than the blasting fulminations of this celestial rebel, who now stands, like a colossus of evil in the realm of good!

The leaders of the conspiracy then meet together and hatch their deep, nefarious plot. Lucifer towers magnificent, the controlling spirit in every plan, full of impelling thought and of tremendous action. Apollion, that "master wit with craftiness the spirits to seduce," and Belial, whose "countenance, smooth-varnished with dissimulation's hue," knows no superior in deception, at Lucifer's command now sow the seeds of dissension broadcast throughout the Heavens. The dialogue between these two celestial rogues shows great dramatic skill, and abounds in subtleties worthy of the chief himself. Their whole plan seems to be:

"Through something specious, 'neath some seeming guised,"

to win first the various chiefs and then the bravest warriors to the standard of the Morning-star; and then with these

"For all eternity Mankind to lock without the gate of Heaven."

A high-sounding resolve,

"That tinkles well in the angelic ear, And flashes like a flame from choir to choir."

The chorus of good angels again comes on the stage, and with antiphonal harmonies reveals the growing discontent. How eloquently it pictures the serene beauties of Heaven, now tarnished with "mournful mists from darkness driven!" A beautiful and poetic synthesis of the preceding act!

THE GATHERING GLOOM.

In the third act, the Heavens are in a blaze of uproar. The rebellion is now widespread; and revolution is imminent. The whole act is one grand antithesis of the loyal and the seditious angels, or Luciferians, as the latter are called. It is strophe and anti-strophe nearly all the way through. It is argument and counter-argument from beginning to end.

With wonderful art, our sympathy for the rank and file of the rebellious spirits is first awakened. One is made to feel that their disaffection is genuine and that their sorrow is unaffected. They represent the dissatisfied people, brought to the verge of frenzy by the wily arts of the demagogue; the howling mob, wanting only the kindling spark to flash into the flame of revolt; the maddened rabble, waiting for the master-spirit to spur them into open revolution.

And the master-spirit appears. Belzebub, by his colossal hypocrisy and diabolical cunning, succeeds in drawing them into an incriminating attitude. Michael, austere and magnificent, approaches at this crisis, and these two chiefs are then thrown into admirable juxtaposition. Michael's grandeur has already been foreshadowed, and his character in every way equals the conception of him that we were led to form.

Like Lucifer, he is preëminently the incarnation of action. He will not argue. He does not appeal. He is a god of battle; not a divinity of words. He is stern and powerful. He is terse and terribly severe; and after a few words full of scathing scorn and ominous with threat, he commands the virtuous angels to part at once from the rebellious horde. He then leaves to learn the will of the Most High.

The disappearance of Michael is the signal for the advent of the head of the rebellion himself. Lucifer now comes opportunely to the front. With great art the meeting of the Field-marshal and the Stadtholder has been avoided. Such a meeting would have brought about a premature crisis. The Luciferians, in a splendid burst of appeal, beg the Stadtholder's protection. To this appeal Lucifer replies in a speech that is sublime in its hypocrisy. He professes blind attachment to God, and proceeds to test their sincerity by skillfully opposing questions of prudence and arguments of peace, while at the same time he admits, apparently with great reluctance, that their grievances are well founded. He hopes, too, that their displeasure will not be accounted as a stain on high, and that God will forgive their righteous resentment.

When, however, he discovers that they are firm in their determination to obtain their rights by force of arms, that they sincerely desire him as their chief, and that at least one-third of all the spirits are already numbered among the rebels, he throws off his mask, and quickly changes front:

"Then shall we venture all, our favor lost To the oppressors of your lawful right."

He now again appears as the imperious prince of revolt, and at Belzebub's solicitation mounts the throne which the latter has meanwhile prepared for him. Belzebub enjoins the hosts to swear allegiance to Lucifer and to his morning-star, which oath is given with a will, and the act is at an end.

The chorus of Luciferians then extol their leader in an ode breathing defiance and blazing with the flame of rebellion. The clanging tread of a mailed warrior resounds in every line. The note of triumph rings out boldly; and with professions of fealty to their chief, and kindling with adoration for his morning-star, they march off the stage. This ode is a curious medley of antique metres, trochees, dactyls, and spondees, attuned to tumultuous emotion. Boldly regular in its classic irregularity, it echoes and re-echoes with the clamor of battle and the shout of revelry. It is a pæan keyed in the strident chord of Hell.

Scarcely have these fiercely jubilant tones died away, when the good angels follow with a plaintive ode of sorrow that is a striking antithesis to the passionate outburst of hate with which the air is yet reverberating.

Strophe and antistrophe proceed in the same mournful iambic measure, in verses sweetly musical with curious rimes, when suddenly in the epode they break into a livelier strain, and in tripping trochaics give voice to an entirely different mood--a fiery indignation mingled with a deep sense of the grave crisis that threatens the autonomy of Heaven.

Here, too, is a foreshadowing of the transcendent power that shall quell this treason. Nothing can be more original and artistic than these lyrics themselves. Nothing can be more harmonious than their blending with the action. Vondel is never more admirable than here.

THE SEETHING SEAS OF SEDITION.

In the fourth act the rebellion has become a conflagration:

"The whole of Heaven glows with the fierce blaze Of tumult and of treachery."

Gabriel, winged with command, comes on the scene, and orders Michael, in the name of God,

"To burn out with a glow of fire and zeal These dark, polluting stains."

Michael is astounded to learn of the treachery of Lucifer, and, in reply to his inquiries, Gabriel gives a beautiful and pathetic account of the progress of the revolt, and tells how the radiant joy of God became overshadowed with mournfulness. Michael now summons Uriel, his armor-bearer, to his side, and at once proceeds to put on his armor, at the same time shouting his orders to his myriad legions around him. In the twinkling of an eye the celestial host stands in marching array and is rapidly hurried forward.

We are now transported into the hostile camp, where Lucifer is seen questioning his generals as to the number and the disposition of his forces. Belzebub replies with a lucid and highly colored report, saying that the deserters sweep onward with

"A rush and roar from every firmament, Like a vast sea aglow with radiant lights."

Lucifer is much pleased to learn this, and from his throne addresses his flaming squadrons in a speech bristling with warlike reason and full of indomitable courage.

He fully apprehends the enormity of his offense, and cunningly makes his hearers equal sharers in his guilt. Retreat is now impossible. The celestial Rubicon is crossed. They have already burnt all bridges behind them. "Necessity, therefore," he says, "must be our law." If defeated, God himself cannot wholly annihilate them; while if they chance to win, "the hated tyranny of Heaven" shall then be changed into a state of freedom; nor shall the angels then be forced

"To pant beneath the yoke of servitude forever."

Once more he demands the oath of allegiance, and is about to give the command, "Forward!" when Belzebub espies the beautiful figure of Rafael winging his golden way trough the crystal empyrean on a mission of mercy.

Even Belzebub is touched at this unlooked-for sign of angelic affection, and his tone, usually so sarcastic and so severely deliberate, as he announces his advent, is softened to a transient tenderness. For once he has forgotten his usual mocking air, and this exquisite touch does much to relieve the sombre impression of his tremendous malignity.

Rafael, a celestial St. John, melting with love for the Stadtholder, falls in a paroxysm of grief and tenderness upon his neck. We intuitively feel that some secret bond of sympathy must bind these two angels, so dissimilar in spirit and in character, together.

Lucifer, overwhelming in passion, gigantic in intellect, resistless in will--magnificent in his whole personality; Rafael, sublime in devotion, infinite in pity, immaculate in holiness--the apotheosis of all that is beautiful! Lucifer, whose eyes flash ambition and whose heart flames hate; Rafael, whose gaze is aspiration and whose soul is love! The genius of evil and the spirit of virtue; the proudly wicked and the meekly good! The infernal masculine stands confronted by the heavenly feminine; harsh violence is caressed by loving gentleness, and pride and humility embrace! Truly a masterly antithesis!

In a strain of glorious appeal, Rafael begs Lucifer to desist, and first aims at the weakest point in his armor--his pride. How splendid his description of Lucifer's glory! His former pomp is here artistically pictured to heighten the contrast with his fall.

He next proceeds to threaten, and gives an equally vivid picture of the horrible punishments--"the worm, endless remorse, and ever-during pain"--reserved for him. He then offers his olive branch as a token of divine mercy, and urges immediate acceptance before it is forever too late. Truth offers hope to error on the high-road to despair; peace pours her golden offering at the iron feet of war!

Lucifer, proud in his consciousness of strength, as the chosen head of millions of angelic warriors, one-third of the entire spirit world, is, however, unmoved. He asseverates that he merely wishes to uphold the ancient charter. The standard of revolt is also the banner of right. Duty has called; justice commanded; friendship inspired him to take this step for the protection of the celestial Fatherland. He, too, then,

"With necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds."

Hear his own words:

"I shall maintain the holy right, compelled By high necessity, thus urged at length, Though much against my will, by the complaints And mournful groans of myriad tongues."

Rafael stands aghast at the picture of such hardened wickedness. His hairs rise with fear to hear the Archangel's shameless confession, and he promptly accuses him of ambition and of gross deceit.

Lucifer, however, indignantly denies this, and proudly asserts that he has always done his full duty. Rafael then reads aloud his evil purpose as it is written in lurid letters on his heart. The astonished chief no longer denies his lust for power, but claims the prerogative of his position as the Stadtholder of God. At last he is brought to the acknowledgment that the ascent of man is the stone upon which his "battle-axe shall whet its edge."

Rafael, like an angel of light, then pleads with this spirit of darkness in tones of sweetest tenderness. He stands here like a personified conscience. He would be the guardian angel of the great Stadtholder. Not a harsh word escapes the stern lips of the flaming Archangel. His own vast knowledge and his deep heart testify how good are the intentions of his friend. What visions are here called up of the happy days of their friendship, when they basked in the untarnished splendors of Heaven, before a thought of evil had tolled the funeral knell of peace!

Argument after argument, in cumulative progression, falls from the pleader's mellifluous tongue. Lucifer is stern and unyielding. Still Rafael pleads on. For an instant Lucifer falters. Rafael sees his advantage; and not only again offers him his olive branch, but appoints himself as Lucifer's hostage with God--so sure is he of obtaining mercy.

Lucifer is almost overcome; but the thought of his morning-star setting in shame and darkness, and a vision of his enemies defiant on the throne, still steels his heart in its obstinate resolve.

Rafael next pictures for him, in lurid colors, the lake of brimstone down below, whose mouth yawns for his destruction. Once more, for the third time, he offers the Archrebel the branch of peace, and promises full grace.

Lucifer then gives voice to that grand soliloquy, beginning:

"What creature else so wretched is as I? On the one side flicker feeble rays of hope, While on the other yawns a flaming horror."

Here he reveals for the first time his inmost heart. This is the crisis of his career--the climax of the whole play. Nowhere is the suspense so keen. One wonders how the Archangel will decide in this critical moment:

"This brevity twixt bliss and endless doom."

His pride of will has in one stroke become a chaos of indecision. We are made to sympathize with his terrible anguish, as the logic of his remorse-throbbing conscience leads him to the bitter adversative:

"But 'tis too late--all hope is past."

The ominous sound of Michael's battle trumpet rudely awakes him from his revery, and forces him to the stern realization of the impending strife. Just at this moment, also, Apollion soars into his presence with the news of the near approach of God's Field-marshal.

Lucifer, however, is as yet too agitated, so soon after his sudden apprehension of the enormity of his crime and of the terrible punishment reserved for him in the probable event of his defeat, to respond with alacrity to the summons. It is with great difficulty that he rouses himself from his soliloquizing mood. He must think; but although he feels far more than his followers that

"The heavy bolt of war should not be weighed Too lightly,"

and although he well knows that the odds are against him, he has, by the time that his other chieftains approach, quite recovered himself, and at once gives the quick, sharp command of the soldier. The time for action has come. Behind their towering leader, amid the blare of bugles and the trumpet's stirring tones, his serried battalions march with waving banners off the stage.

Of this busy scene Rafael, meanwhile, has been a silent but interested spectator. Now alone in his sorrow, he melts into a compassionate monologue; and, joined by the chorus, gives utterance to that beautiful lyric of grief, that tender prayer so full of the sweet melody of appeal, at the end of the fourth act. Amid the jarring clamor and the frenzied shout of the departing squadrons, this anthem of mercy rises to God like a benediction. Over the passion waves of the tumultuous hell of rebellion around them, their voices tremble like the echoes of a heaven forever lost.

Surely, the emotion of forgiving compassion was never combined with a more musical sorrow. Here, as in all of Vondel's lyrics, there is a perfect harmony between the form and the thought.

FLOOD AND FLAME.

At the opening of the last act, Rafael is discovered on the battlements of Heaven. He is in a fever of anxiety to learn the result of the contest, and peers into the empyrean for some sign of a messenger from the field,

"Where armies reel on slopes with lightning crowned."

The glad sounds of approaching triumph fall on his ear. Across the pure hyaline now dart meteoric flashes of light. Each shield of the victorious legions dazzles like a sun:

"Each shield-sun streams a day of triumph forth."

Far in advance of the returning battalions speeds Uriel, "Angel with swiftest wing," bearing the message of victory. With incredible velocity--for he is winged with good news--he flashes through the air, in his "aery wheels" exultingly waving his "flaming, keen, two-edged sword." He has reached the serene altitude of Heaven. He has gained the farthest wall. He is at hand.

Rafael is full of eagerness to hear the details of the fight, the particulars of "this the first campaign in Heaven." Uriel then, "with sequence just," gives a vivid account of the preparations for battle, beginning with the moment when Gabriel first informed Michael of the defection of the Stadtholder.

He tells how the countless loyal legions, at their chief's command, deploy themselves in battle line until they form in serried rank

"One firm Trilateral host that like a triangle Thrust out its edges sharp upon the eye."

Michael, the Field-marshal, stands in the heart of this triangle, towering high above his fellows, the personification of judgment,

"With the glow Of lurid lightnings in his lifted hand."

Splendid is the picture of the infernal host; their squadrons,

"Battalion on battalion, riders pale On dim mysterious chargers,"

advance in the form of a crescent moon. Belzebub and Belial command the two horns of this formidable array,

"Both standing there in shining panoply, Vying in splendors grand."

Lucifer himself holds the centre, "the point strategic" of his army, while Apollion behind him bears on high the lofty standard with its streaming morning-star.

Rafael, in his excitement, occasionally interrupts this graphic description with exclamations of wonder, and, as the story of the terrible conflict progresses, also with occasional cries of horror and of pity. Great art is shown in the introduction of these exclamatory pauses into the long account of the battle scene. It not only gives the narrator time to get breath, but voices the feelings of the listener, and intensifies his suspense.

Then follows a brilliant account of the Stadtholder. As the rebel chief is the protagonist, and as the seditious angels furnish the subject matter for the drama, the poet has artistically described them at great length. At last the two armies confront each other. We are now made to see how they

"Panted for strife and for destruction flamed."

Then follows the famous battle scene, which must be read in the poet's own thrilling words. Here is action in every line, a battle stroke in each word.

After the first onset, the celestial legions begin by circling wheels to soar aloft, whence, like a falcon, they shall soon precipitate themselves upon their enemies, who, having also risen, but with heavier sail, are likened to a flock of drowsing herons, thrown into sudden consternation by the sight of their dreaded foe.

Uriel now gives a striking picture of the grand perspective above--the celestial legions, high in the empyrean, arrayed like a shining triangle, the symbol of the Trinity; far beneath, the infernal phalanx, gleaming like a crescent on the turbaned brow of night, the sign of the Turk, whose ferocious hordes, even in Vondel's time, were yet thundering at the gate of Christendom. Thus each army hangs:

"Suspended like a silent cloud, Full weighted 'gainst the balanced air."

Again the celestial triangle, with terrific force, crashes into the infernal half-moon, and flames of brimstone, red and blue, flash far out into the sky. Thunderbolt on thunderbolt, unchained, leap with angry roar into the surging horde, leaving havoc, ruin, and desolation in their lurid wake. The centre of the half-moon begins to break; and its pointed horns nearly meet together behind the resistless triangle.

Lucifer performs wonderful feats of valor. High on his blazing chariot, he is a conspicuous figure. His fierce team, "the lion and the dragon blue," symbolic of pride and envy, enraged by the battle-strokes rained upon their starry backs, fly forward with fearful strides--the lion, with dreadful bellows, biting and rending; while his terrible mate shoots pest-provoking poisons from his frothy tongue, and,

"... Raving, fills the air With smoke blown from his nostrils far and wide."

On every side the infernal chief is surrounded by his enemies. They try to overpower him with mere numbers. He parries every stroke, or breaks their force upon his shield. He then waves his battle-axe aloft to fell God's glowing banner, when Michael, clad in glittering armor, "like a god amid a ring of suns," suddenly confronts him.

The Archangel sternly calls upon the rebel Prince to surrender. But Lucifer, unmoved, three times with his war-axe strives to cleave the diamond shield of Michael, wherein blazed God's most holy name. The axe rebounds and shivers into fragments; and we cannot but sympathize with the Archrebel, who is now in a bad plight indeed. The grand catastrophe to which the swift current of his wickedness has been bearing him is at last at hand, reserved with consummate art until the middle of this act.

Michael lifts his terrible right hand, and through the helmet and head of his disarmed but yet unconquered foe he smites his lightnings, cleaving unto his very eyes. The force of this blow is such that Lucifer is hurled from his chariot, which follows him downward, whirling round and round in its descent:

"Thus lion, dragon, driver, all plunge down."

In vain the fierce swarms of warring rebels attempt to stay their chief. Uriel engages Apollion, and succeeds in wresting from him the rebel banner with its morning-star. Belzebub and Belial still fight on; but their legions are all confused. The crescent has now become a disorganized mob,

"And o'er them fell destruction rolls its flood."

In vain Apollion comes back into the field, reinforced by the monsters from the firmament of Heaven, which may be supposed to typify, as Vondel says in his preface, the abuse of the forces of nature by the Devil to effect his evil designs.

Orion, shrieking until the very air grows faint, strives to crush the head of the assault, that

"... Heedless of Orion or his club, moves grandly on."

The Northern Bears stand upon their haunches to oppose their brutish strength. The Hydra gapes with poison-breathing throats. But, unmindful of all these, the triangle still advances. Numerous other episodes, in the meanwhile, are happening along the line of battle; but the suspense is at last over. The victory of the celestial angels is a glorious fact.

Rafael now gives utterance to exclamations of praise, and asks Uriel concerning the effect of his defeat on the fallen Archangel. Uriel then recounts his terrible punishment, and relates how his splendid beauty was now become, in falling, a complication of seven dreadful monsters, typifying the seven deadly sins. That beast, says the narrator,

"Doth shrink to view its own deformity, And veils with darkling mists its Gorgon face."

The fate of the protagonist being known, Rafael next wishes to learn what became of the rest of the rebel host. Then follows the account of the tumultuous rout, wherein the fleeing hordes, in their descent to Hell, also undergo a metamorphosis into the forms of strange and uncouth monsters.

At this point the triumphant Michael himself approaches with his victorious legions, laden with glorious plunder. The celestial choristers, strewing their laurel leaves, accompanied by the sound of cymbal, pipe, and drum, now greet him with a song of jubilation which, even more than most of Vondel's lyrics, is peculiar for the intricacy of its rimes.

"Hail to the hero, hail," they cry. The spirit and liveliness of this pæan are eminently suited to voice the long pent-up plaudits of the angels. The regularity of this ode, with its rapid melodious swing, is a marked contrast to the strident enthusiasm and the discordant harmony of the chorus of Luciferians at the end of Act III.

As soon as the joyful reverberations of the battle-hymn have ceased to roll through the interminable arches on high, Michael addresses his legions and the assembled hosts in a speech of great dignity, ascribing the glory of the victory to God alone. He speaks proudly of the spoils of battle, which have already been hung on the bright axis of Heaven.

"No more shall we," says he,

"Behold the glow of Majesty supreme Dimmed by the damp of base ingratitude."

He next pictures the defeated rebels as:

"...All blind and overcast With shrouding mists, and horribly deformed."

Then he concludes with stern sententiousness:

"Thus is his fate who would assail God's Throne,"

which the choristers as gravely repeat.

The expected catastrophe has occurred, and the terrible conclusion has been described. In the stormy wake of the sad fall of the angels follows the no less sad fall of man--the loss of

"The primal innocence 'mid Eden's bowers."

The heaving, seething seas of rebellion, "swollen to the skies," have, it is true, subsided; but again they gather momentum for one more wave of disaster, which now breaks upon the shore of Earth, spreading death and desolation throughout the sinless groves of Paradise; for Gabriel now approaches and hurls into the joyful camp a thunderbolt of sad surprise. "Alas! alas!" he cries, breaking into lamentation, "our triumph is in vain;" and he announces the fall of Adam.

Michael is astounded, and shudders as he hears the news. With infinite distress he listens to Gabriel's interesting account of how the overthrow was effected. Gabriel first describes the "dim, infernal consistory" far, far below. Here Lucifer called together all his chieftains, who now

"Unto each other turned abhorring gaze."

Then,

"High-seated 'mid his councillors of state,"

the Archfiend, whose character is now shown in its full development, addressed his followers in words full of bitter rage against God--a striking contrast to the dignity of Michael's address.

His heart is now a hell of hate, boiling with passion for revenge. The Heavens must be persecuted and circumvented, and this must be done by the ruin of man. With prophetic eye he pictures his future dominion on earth, and the myriad miseries into which the fall shall plunge mankind. He then promises his fellow-conspirators the future adoration of the human race, when as heathen gods and pagan deities they shall receive the praise of countless multitudes of men.

At this point Michael breaks into fierce execrations, making a vow of summary and condign punishment. Gabriel then continues to relate how Lucifer selected Belial as the most worthy instrument to seduce the happy pair. Belial, taking upon himself the form of the Serpent, succeeds most fiendishly in his unholy mission, first, as in the Biblical account, alluring Eve, who in turn tempts Adam. Their fall and shame and misery are pathetically told. In the midst of this sad story the chorus interjects its wail of sympathy, while Gabriel continues by narrating the colloquy of the hapless twain with God.

Gabriel then gives the woeful details of their penalty, and presents a dismal picture of future wretchedness, against the blackness of which, however, is one bright star--the promise of the Strong One, the Hero who shall crush the Serpent's head.

Gabriel now commands Michael to place all things in their wonted place lest the malicious spirits should "further mischief brew." Michael, the spirit of eternal order, then proceeds to reduce this chaos of evil to final subjection.

He first sends Uriel down,

"To drive the pair from Eden who have dared Transgress, so rash and blind, the primal law."

His duty it is, also, to force mankind

"To labor, sweat, and arduous slavery."

He is, furthermore, to act as sentinel over the garden and over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Ozias is enjoined to capture and securely bind the host of the infernal animals with the lion and the dragon, who so furiously raged against the standard of Heaven. Listen to this stern command:

"Sweep from the sky these hordes accursed, and bind Them neck and claw, and chain them forcibly."

Azarias is entrusted with the key of the bottomless abyss, wherein he is commanded to lock all that assail the powers of Heaven. To Maceda is given the torch to light the sulphurous lake down in the centre of the earth, wherein Lucifer, the evil-breeding protagonist, with poetic justice, so near the scene of his last flagrant crime, is doomed to endless solitary torment; there,

"... In the eternal fire Unquenchable, with chilling frosts commingled,"

"Amid the bitter blast of memory's regret,"

to suffer the throes of ten thousand hells, and to discover

"How slow time limps upon a crutch of pain,"

through an eternity of keen remorse.

For the last time the chorus comes on the stage, echoing in a brief epilogue the one silvery voice of hope that speaks from that dark conclusion of multitudinous despair.

It, too, gives promise of a brighter dawn, wherein the "grand deliverer" shall cleanse fallen man of the "foul taint original," opening for him a fairer Paradise on high, where the thrones, made vacant by the fall of the angels, shall, as in Cædmon, be filled by the glorified souls of the children of men Thus the spectator is left attuned to the triumph of Christ in the promised reconciliation, and the work of redemption is made complete.

In this noble ending, evil, though not annihilated, is controlled; the good is victorious; and Heaven is once more restored to its pristine holiness. The fallen angels, the imperious lords of Heaven, have been succeeded by the lowly third estate, the human worms whom they so much despised.

Thus here, too, revolution has proved progression. The storm of war has ceased, and above the thunder-mantled sky shines the glorious rainbow of peace.

THE "LUCIFER" AS A DRAMA.

Like all of Vondel's dramas, the "Lucifer" is after the Greek model; and surely that model was never inspiration for a more splendid tragedy. Vondel's idea of the classic drama was derived from the close study of the ancients and their modern Dutch commentators--Heinsius, Vossius, Grotius, Barlæus, and other Latinists of renown.

The "Lucifer" is a tragedy after Chaucer's own heart:

"Tragedis is to sayn a certeyn storie, As olde bokes maken us memorie, Of hem that stood in greet prosperité, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into miserie, and endith wrecchedly."

There is no death, no blood, no murder. It is the drama of a magnificent ruin!

The action of the play, pursuing the straight track of one controlling purpose, and moving with terrible majesty to the goal of an inevitable destiny, also makes it a tragedy in the larger dramatic sense. The wonderful characterization and the overpowering ethical motive also make its application universal. The epico-lyrical quality of this drama, furthermore, gives it a force and cohesiveness unattainable by either epic or lyric.

True, the "Lucifer" as a drama does not deal with men. However, this is a distinction without a difference; for the characters, while they command our awe as divinities not subject to the limitations of this carnal shroud, the body, are yet sufficiently human to elicit our warmest sympathy.

It is, moreover, a play full of heart-agitating passion; and it is addressed, in a most extraordinary degree, to the moral nature--the chief function of all tragedy. Here, too, as in the great drama of the universe, the divine law is the first propelling cause of the action.

The clash of interests and the logical destiny of cause and effect carry the tragic subject without apparent effort to its denouement. The causes are everywhere adequate to produce the effects, and no trivial effects are the result of the huge action; no mountain is set in travail to bring forth a mouse. The disposition of the characters also conforms to our sense of justice, and their development is everywhere within the range of probability.

Besides the main theme, ambition, and the chief object, self-aggrandizement, are various incidental themes and objects which naturally arise out of the circumstances and conditions of the play. This is, however, but natural, and only renders the drama more varied and interesting; these little streams of interest being but tributaries to the main stream of the action, contributing to, rather than retarding, its majestic sweep to the Niagara of its catastrophe.

The drama, though concerning the divine beings of another sphere, conforms, except where tradition or religion has invested these with extraordinary qualities and powers, to the physical requirements of this, thus making it more probable and the action more dramatic.

The dramatist is a veritable illusion-weaving magician, leading the spectator through tortuous mazes of expectation into a labyrinth of suspense. The end is reached, and lo! the path which appeared so bewilderingly crooked is straight and direct, without a turn to its starting point. Everywhere, too, the mind of the reader coöperates with the mind of the poet in his logical appeals to the heart.

The action, moreover, has its mainspring in error, and ends in showing the natural consequences of crime, with a picture of the sin atoned though not unpunished.

Nowhere is the human interest of this drama lessened by grand scenic displays. These are truly splendid; but even such sublime properties as the universe affords only heighten the interest by showing that, after all, "the thinking will" we call the soul is the noblest work of God. As played on the stage, the drama must have had exceedingly simple, though perhaps somewhat costly, accessories.

Nothing in the play is more admirable than the uninterrupted contrast of thought and the constant antithesis of character. Nothing, furthermore, can surpass the inimitable art with which the monologue is handled at the critical moments that determine a character, as in Lucifer's soul-revealing soliloquy in the fourth act. Here the action, though still sweeping irresistibly on, seems to be in perfect poise, while the inmost secrets of the heart are laid bare.

In his dialogue, also, Vondel is simple and direct. The conversation is always used to recall, to suggest, or to display some motive that binds, while, at the same time, it urges, the action. In such scenes, of course, talk is action.

If art is, as some assert, a thing of proportions, then surely this drama is entitled to the highest praise; for its proportions are irreprehensible. If, too, as Ruskin says, "Poetry is the suggestion by the imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions," as a poem, also, it is unsurpassed. There are, indeed, as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. The "Lucifer" is Vondel's definition.

It is conception that suggests the correlated thought. It is construction that shapes it to the stature of a grand design; and construction is the highest form of the creative intellect; for was it not this same power that framed the templed universe out of the scattered fragments of countless millions of stars? It is in construction, the highest requisite of the dramatist, wherein the "Lucifer" is most grand. The architecture of the play is as symmetrical as a beautiful Greek temple.

There is no obscurity in this classic drama, into which, moreover, the poet has introduced enough of the modern romantic to lend it vivacity and interest. Such a subject could not have been cast save in a classic mould. The romantic drama would not have been equal to the majestic dignity and the stately style demanded by this sublime theme.

Each act, with its own subordinate conclusion, is followed by a chorus which not only fills the pause, but also intensifies, while at the same time it relieves, the suspense. These choruses, noble melodies of retrospect, are yet charged with the rumbling thunder of the coming catastrophe. Each is, as it were, an incarnate conscience, the concentrated echo of the preceding act, gathering around it the action, and blending harmoniously with it.

Vondel is one of the few moderns who grasped the fact that the Hellenic drama originated in rhythmic song, and that around the choral ode should gather the action and the interest of the play. His chorus, therefore, act both as singers and as interpreters of the action, relieving the measured tread of stately tragedy with pauses of musical suspense. Often, also, they break into the dialogue, and act as mediators and as moralists.

The chorus represent the populi of Heaven, and voice the sentiments of the many. The interchange of thoughts between chorus and chorus, and the chorus and the persons, produces variety. To this the swift changes of thought and emotion also contribute.

Here, also, as in the Greek dramas, we observe the proper subordination of the chorus to the protagonist and the chief characters, and of the lyric to the dramatic elements, while through the whole play the length of the speeches is artfully suited to the character and the situation. Much, too, might be said about Vondel's felicities of rime, his sweet feminine rimes, his stately, sonorous hexameters, his trimeters and tetrameters, his frequent use of the various classic metres, and his admirable shifting of the cæsura to suit the feeling of the speaker.

The three unities are here also carefully preserved, which perhaps was the more easily done on account of the divinity of the characters, to which a celerity of movement was natural not possible to mortals.

Hence, the time of the whole drama from the inception of the revolt until the final catastrophe could very probably be included in twenty-four hours. The unity of action we have already spoken of. The unity of place is equally well kept. The "Lucifer," hardly two thousand seven hundred lines, including the choruses, conforms also in respect to length to the classic standard.

The growth of the play is no less wonderful than the characterization, many preparations and conspiracies developing at last into a battle, many scenes into a definite situation; the numberless changes of cause and effect at length resulting in a plot full of the force of an action-impelling motive. Thus from the varied complexities of circumstance and situation is at last evolved the one controlling purpose.

A fine antithesis to the turbulent catastrophe is the quiet climax, Lucifer's soliloquy in Act IV.; where, however, all that precedes is resolved into one intense situation. The advent of Rafael here, furthermore, is an unforeseen complication to heighten the interest.

The end, by suggestive reminiscence of the fading perspective of the beginning, unites the commencement with the close, making the drama an organic whole, whose soul is purpose and whose heart is truth.

The exquisite blending of the action with the characters, each shaping the other, has rarely been equalled. It is the characters, after all, that are the chief interest and that control the action. We see here the strange anomaly of a classic play where the individual shapes the action, and is yet conquered by law.

Here, where the will of a god clashes with the supreme will of the Supreme God, great art is necessary to sustain human interest--to delay the interposition of the superior deity until the very close.

The primary motive, self-exaltation, fails grandly; yet in its failure it brings into partial fulfilment the secondary motive, the fall of man. True, the logical catastrophe does not occasion surprise. It has all along, as in every tragedy, been foreshadowed by circumstances big with fate. Yet Vondel has added the element of surprise, and to a remarkable degree, by the introduction of a second catastrophe, the expulsion of Adam from Paradise, the natural result of the first. Thus curiosity and reason only end with the play itself. One by one, too, the various episodes are seen to spring from the action, which, moreover, requires no introduction of antecedent circumstance to set it in motion.

The _ensemble_ scenes, or groups, a sure test of the great dramatist, are handled in a masterly manner. There is also a delightful retardation which heightens the suspense and delays the catastrophe, until, like an electric cloud, it bursts into the thunder of its own generating.

Each messenger, in the play, brings vividly before the eye of the spectator the consequential scene which he himself has just witnessed--of which, perhaps, he has been a part.

Thus, by the artful use of motive-producing complications, the action, once projected, moves on to its end, where the totality of figures, thoughts, and emotions are drawn into one maelstrom of ruin.

There is no distraction. There is no swerving from the opening to the catastrophe; from the catastrophe to the conclusion, the awful retribution.

As in the tragedy of life, so, too, in this drama, the innocent suffer through the punishment that overtakes the guilty; witness the sorrow of Rafael and the good angels at the fall of their fellows; the sin of Adam and Eve, and the doom pronounced upon their innocent descendants.

The truth of Vondel's poetic conception is seen in the fact that its essential elements are coeval with man and coeternal with the universe. As in Sophocles, we hardly know which most to admire, the balanced proportions of the play, or its general conception. Here, also, we often, in a single sentence, find a synthesis of a situation or a character.

Vondel, moreover, most impressively introduces into the ancient Greek form, with its suggestion of an over-ruling destiny, the modern idea of free will. And he does it so admirably that there is no confusion. Simple in its complexity, splendid in its largeness of design, grand in its harmony, magnificent in its whole conception, the drama sweeps irresistibly through the whole gamut of human emotion.

Such epic breadth and intense lyric concentration have rarely been combined in one poem. Such a drama is, indeed, the sum of all the arts!

THE CHARACTERIZATION.

Vondel's devils are no devils, until the last act, when they act no more, but are described. Then truly they are the incarnations of Hell's deepest deviltries, and are as splendid in their malignity as they were formerly superb in their wickedness.

The sophistries of these evil spirits are scarcely inferior to those in "Faust." They are the meshes of a gigantic delusion woven by the leaders of the conspiracy around the rank and file of the angels, seducing them from bliss to doom.

Belzebub is the cynic of the play--a compound of Iago and Mephistopheles. This dark contriver of hellish plots is colossal in his malignity. He is the first in Heaven to make a prurient suggestion. He is more fiend than his noble superior. Sleepless, unrelenting, resourceful, alert, he conjures motives of evil even from the tender beauty of the primal innocence. He finds the gall of hate even in the sweet flower of Eden's sinless love. His is the deliberating intellect necessary for the Stadtholder's counsellor; and though slowly unfolding the many sides of his malign nature, he is, we feel, evil from the beginning, grandly diabolical.

Belial, conscienceless and without remorse, is utterly depraved; a vile seducer, the genius of deceit, who does evil for its own sake; a useful tool to serve the baser purposes of the chief devil. Apollion has some gleams of goodness in his nature, but is weak, lustful, and easily influenced by the hope of gain--a type of the traitor. All of the devils, and they are the chief characters of the play, may be supposed to represent the different phases of evil; while the good angels, whose characteristics have been but briefly indicated, show the different attributes of the Deity.

As in the "Œdipus Tyrannus," "the country must be purged," so here, too, the Heavens must be cleansed of "this perjured scum,"--the rebellious angels.

We must now proceed to speak of Lucifer: his all-consuming wrath, his ambition, his pride, and infernal energy. These traits are exhibited in gigantic outlines even before his fall. After his defeat, what can be more impressive than his all-enduring Archangelic passion, glorious in its all-defying mood? Not his the wild outbursts nor the mad ravings of Lear. Every ebullition of his anger is fraught with purpose, and is transmuted into revengeful action. Mind and spirit are, after all, the conquering forces of the universe. Material circumstance and physical environment cannot thwart their design. It is this ennobling consciousness of intellectual power, supplemented by unconquerable and irresistible will, that makes the magnificence of the personality of Lucifer. Like Milton's Satan, he is, we feel, most near a god when he is most a devil.

Lucifer, like Macbeth, is not influenced all at once. With a god-like circumspection, he first weighs every atom of probability. However, when the die is cast and the line of rebellion has once been crossed, he fights to the last ditch.

Lucifer is a sublime egoist--the spirit of negation placed against the limitations of the positive. He is overpowering. No one, even for an instant, dares to dispute his power, not even the grand Michael. His is the unconquerable Batavian heart. He dominates the entire action, and like a magnet draws all the other characters around him. Though jealousy of man is the animating passion of the lower devils and the excuse of the protagonist himself, yet we feel that he uses this merely as a stalking horse for his overweening ambition. Lucifer would become God himself. It is an unwritten law of great tragedy that the villain, though a villain, must be admirable. Lucifer, arch-villain that he is, is superb in his constructive villany--a very god of evil, with resources at his command formidable enough to make or to mar a world, and yet resulting only in his own undoing. Proud in the consciousness of godlike powers, he thinks,

"I have a bit of fiat in my soul, And can myself create a little world."

His confidence, however, proves to be but the fiat of his damnation.

"There is no fiercer hell than the failure in a great undertaking." Into this hell Lucifer was forever thrust. Yet he is allowed one brief moment of happiness; it is where he proclaims himself a god, and is worshipped by his followers.

Lucifer is the prince of thinkers, and a monarch among actors. His is the intellect to plan and to conceive, and the will to execute; and will is above all the one quality emphasized. As much as he is in this respect supereminent, so much greater the degree of his guilt. Could the force of this faculty have been better shown than in the picture of the fallen Archangel, where, in the agonies of torture and the throes of expiation, he not only deliberates, resolves, and executes, but even exults, as, culling the bitter sweetness of a hopeless hope from the hell-flower of despair, he rejoices in the fiendish triumph that he knows is but the prelude to everlasting doom? Unlike the unconquerable and torture-racked Prometheus, he allows not one sigh to escape from the depths of his anguish; not one moan rises from his abysmal despair. Malediction alone can unlock his implacable lips. From even the caverns of Hell he projects his evil genius back into space to accomplish a predetermined revenge.

Lucifer reasons with Rafael and with Gabriel; but with Michael only war is possible. The two chiefs are too equal in power, too proud, and too warlike to waste time in words. Each, accustomed to command, will brook no authority in the other. The pathos and the tenderness of Rafael, on the other hand, present a strong relief to the sombre passions of Lucifer. It is the ethical portraiture of this drama that is its most powerful feature.

Lucifer, also, in a certain sense, represents the ideal Dutchman--combining in a losing struggle the daring of Civilis and the intellect of Erasmus with the astuteness and magnanimity of William the Silent--a grand hero in a bad cause! Lucifer has indeed "set the time out of joint" for Adam's seed; yet the play also gives promise of the Christ who will again make all things right; there is here, also, a suggestion of the "Paradise Regained."

The drama is ended; the thunders have ceased to roll, and are again chained to the chariot of the Deity; the lightnings once more slumber in the bosom of the night. The battle is over, the air is again pure and clear. The good has been exalted; the bad has been debased. The heart of the spectator, too, has been the scene of the battle of the passions: terror, pity, hope, despair, love, joy, peace have each alternated in brief possession. The _katharsis_ of the soul is accomplished. It has been purified of all that is gross and earthly. It has become spiritualized. It has become conscious of its wings, thrilled with aspiration for the ethereal and for the stars beyond.

IS THE "LUCIFER" A POLITICAL ALLEGORY?

It is maintained by several eminent Dutch critics that the "Lucifer" is a political allegory like the "Palamedes" and several other tragedies of Vondel.

Some of these literati have displayed considerable ingenuity in their attempt to prove that it typifies the struggle of the Netherlands against Spain; Orange corresponding to Lucifer, Philip II. to God, Alva to Michael, the Cardinal Granvelle to Adam.

Many of the situations of the play bear out this analogy. Lucifer, like Orange, was the idol of his followers. Both desire to change a hated tyranny to a state of freedom. Both speak grandiloquently of a charter disannulled and of ancient privileges violated.

The simile of the sea dashing in vain against the rock in the battle-scene of the "Lucifer" may be supposed to illustrate the device of Orange: "_Sævis tranquillus in undis._" The crescent array of the rebels may refer to the shibboleth of the water-beggars: "Rather Turk than Papist."

The lion and the dragon that draw the chariot of the Archfiend are also blazoned upon the crest of the two provinces, Holland and Zealand, which were the chief supporters of Orange. The medley of seven beasts into which Lucifer, in falling, was changed, may be taken to represent the seven Northern provinces that became the Dutch Republic, while the Southern provinces, which remained loyal to Spain, nearly two-thirds of the whole number, may be typified by the faithful angels.

Lucifer renewed the fight three times; so did Orange. Both pretended to fight "_pro lege, rege, et grege_."

In that age, before successful revolutions had established a precedent, no revolt could hope for success unless by conforming to the maxim "the king can do no wrong"--a cardinal principle in every religion of that day. By this political fiction rebels professed to fight for the king, though really fighting against him. Vondel pictured his revolt after these examples, the most prominent of which was the revolt of his own country against Philip II. Lucifer, however, fell, and Orange triumphed; though the assassination of the latter might be taken as equivalent to a fall. Lucifer accomplished the fall of Adam, even as Orange brought about the expulsion of Granvelle. Alva, like Michael, furthermore, received the charge "to burn out with a glow of fire and zeal" the polluting stains of heresy. Egmont and Montigny, like Gabriel and Rafael, acted as ambassadors.

The cause of the jealousy of the Netherlander, as in the "Lucifer," was the fact that greater privileges were accorded to foreigners (the Spaniards) than to the hereditary princes of the land. As in the drama Gabriel's proclamation is followed by protest and rebellion, so in the Netherlands the unjust edicts of Philip were the primary cause of revolt.

It was the sworn duty of the Stadtholder, William of Orange, even as of the Stadtholder Lucifer, to maintain the laws of his superior. Orange also held a position similar to that of Lucifer. He was the favorite of Charles V., Stadtholder of Holland, and Knight of the Golden Fleece. Each placed himself at the head of the disaffected at their earnest importunity. Each was accused of ambition. Each accomplished his designs by Machiavelian methods, and attained a brief exaltation.

Cardinal Granvelle, who held a position similar to Adam in the drama, was, like him, of low descent; and was honored with greater privileges than even the nobles themselves, who hated him intensely. The opponents of the Cardinal changed the liveries of their servants into motley to mock him; so, also, we hear Lucifer say to his minions:

"Lay off your morning rays and wreaths of light."

The nobles complained of the presence of Spanish troops in the land; so the Luciferians speak of "Adam's life-guard, many thousand strong." The arguments of the drama were also the arguments advanced by the several parties in the Dutch revolt.

The three hierarchies of Heaven in the "Lucifer" correspond to Margaret's three Councils of State. Lucifer, though described as nighest to God, belonged only to the third rank of the hierarchies; just as Orange, though first among the Dutch noblemen, and next to Philip II., was yet subject to the State as Stadtholder.

Brederode, as the head of the aristocrats who went with supplications to Margaret of Parma, bears a close analogy to Belzebub, where the latter says to the Luciferians,

"With prayers ye first and best might gain your end,"

and where, too, he expresses his willingness to act as mediator. In this scheme, furthermore, Apollion would represent Louis of Nassau, and Belial, Marnix St. Aldegonde.

Others see in the drama the career of the great Wallenstein, the ambitious Generalissimo of the Thirty Years' War. In his envy of the son of his emperor, and in his desire to place the crown of Hungary on his own head, an analogy is suggested to Lucifer's attitude to Adam. Even as the celestial rebels swore their chief allegiance, so, too, his generals, after the reverse of Pilsen, when his enemies wished to deprive him of his command, swore him faith and fealty.

Vondel, it is asserted, was conscious of this when he dedicated this drama to Ferdinand the Third, Emperor of Austria, who was no other than the intended King of Hungary who had aroused the envy of Wallenstein, and whose succession to the crown had been so much endangered by the latter's treachery.

But there is yet another view of the subject, which has even more show of probability than either of the others. It is supposed by many that the "Lucifer" was intended to represent the English Rebellion of 1648. Lucifer in this analogy is supposed to represent Cromwell, whom Vondel hated so bitterly and against whom he thundered such tremendous invective. Indeed, there are some external circumstances in support of this theory. Speaking of his lampoons on the great English rebel, the poet says that they were written the same year that he "taught Lucifer his rôle to play." He also says elsewhere that the "Lucifer" was presented,

"Forsooth, as edifying lore, Wherein proud England hath much store."

If the last supposition be true, the drama is remarkable as prophesying the fall of the Commonwealth, and the Restoration. It would then, moreover, not be uninteresting to compare it with Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," in which Oliver Cromwell is also one of the chief characters.

THE INTERPRETATION.

Yet we cannot believe that the "Lucifer" is a political allegory. Vondel was no more the poet of the "Palamedes." Those thirty years had wonderfully developed his art. Nor is it an idyllic allegory like the "Comus;" but, like the "Divina Commedia," an allegory of the world. Yet behind the characters of the sacred legend we may also see the national heroes, Siegfried, Beowulf, Civilis, Orange.

The "Lucifer" represents the gigantic and eternal battle of evil with good, with the universe as the battle-field--a type of the unending conflict in which the good finally conquers. We see here the Oriental imagination curbed by the reason of the Occident--the cold, statuesque Greek form aglow with the blazing Hebrew soul. The flaming Seraph of Christianity, winged with truth and armed with the lightning sword of Jehovah and the blasting thunderbolts of Jupiter, sweeps triumphant through the whole drama. Right prevails; wrong is overthrown.

The "Lucifer" is a theory of existence, a scheme of the universe. It is the revolt of the aspiring ideal against the invincible actual. It is the material against the spiritual; the unknown rendered comprehensible by the symbolism of the known.

"From shadowy types to truth; from flesh to spirit"

--this is the order of its progression.

It is the revolution of the speculative against the rule of dogma; an impassioned contemplation of life, in which the whole gamut of human feelings is harmoniously sounded; in which every link in the chain of causation is struck into the music of its meaning; in which the past and the future are mirrored in the present.

It is the struggle of a soul against the unchangeable environment of fate; the drama of the collective human soul aspiring from a chaos of unrest to the unattainable peace of absolute truth.

Furthermore, the tragedy typifies the character of the Hollanders themselves; a people who, as Charles V. once remarked, made "the best of subjects, but the worst of slaves;" a nation that has ever been in revolt, not only against man, but even against the sublime forces of nature; a race that has never known defeat.

The Batavians, who under Claudius Civilis carried on a successful rebellion against the all-conquering eagles of Rome--the only Germans who never bowed beneath the Latin yoke--and their Saxon descendants, who were the strongest foes of the territorial aggressions of Charlemagne, were all flamed with the same unconquerable spirit. It was this spirit, too, that enabled the Hollanders of the seventeenth century, after more than eighty years of terrible conflict, to free themselves alike from the grinding oppression of Spain and the still more oppressive coils of religious tyranny.

The Dutch struggle itself was a terrific drama, of which William the Silent was the protagonist, and liberty the one controlling purpose that animated every character, that impelled every action. It was the details, the reasons, the arguments, and the conditions of this stupendous struggle that were before the poet's mind when he wrote this tragedy.

The "Lucifer," though a symbolic sketch of the age which preceded it, is essentially a drama embodying the spirit of the time in which it was created. It is a reflex of the life of that epoch, the embodiment of the soul consciousness of the "storm and stress" period of Vondel's own life. He himself was in perpetual revolt against the universal practices of his age.

Is it a wonder that men, seeing in it not only a picture of themselves, but also of their time, were at once attracted by its significance?

The Titanic imagination of the "Nibelungen" and the tremendous imagery of "Beowulf" were both the inevitable expression of the tumultuous soul of the Teuton, conscious of a great destiny. This was in the dawn of the nation's childhood.

We next view the race in the pride of its glorious youth, rousing itself, after the sleep of centuries, to gigantic action. From that age sprang the "Lucifer."

We then see it in the maturity of noble, reflecting manhood, whose years have given dignity and strength. "Faust" stands before us as its full expression. And Vondel and Goethe are each the "Seeing Eye" that pierced the hidden mystery of his time. Each in his own way solved the world riddle.

Like "Faust," the "Lucifer" is "ever more a striving towards the highest existence." True, the striving hero has here been hurled to the depths of the lowest abyss; yet is not his motive also the animating spirit of the race, ever onward and upward towards the unattainable?

Like the defeated Lucifer in Hell, the Teuton is ever evolving courage for a new attempt, fired with the hope that never despairs.

"Siegfried," "Beowulf," and "Lucifer," all typify the Anglo-Saxon spirit of revolt, that love of freedom and that strong individualism which has always been the distinguishing characteristic of the Low Germans.

Of the "Lucifer," therefore, it may truly be said, it is the biography of a national soul.

TRANSLATOR.

Bibliography of Vondelian Literature.

JOOST VAN DEN VONDEL, SEIN LEBEN UND SEINE WERKE. Von A. Baumgartner, S.J. Freiburg-im Breisgau, 1882. Pages 344-347, synopsis of Vondel's works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF VONDEL'S WORKS. J.H.W. Unger. Amsterdam, 1888 (Frederic Muller & Co.). All editions of the "Lucifer" are here mentioned. This volume is in the library of Columbia University.

For the student we would recommend the excellent little edition of the "Lucifer" edited by N.A. Cramer (1891). Price 40 cents. Publisher, W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle, Holland.

BIOGRAPHY OF VONDEL. By Brandt. W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle.

BIOGRAPHY OF VONDEL. By Dr. G. Kalff. W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle.

We also heartily recommend the following studies by Dr. Kalff: "The Literature and Drama of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century;" "The Sources of Vondel's Works," in vol. xii. of Oud Holland (magazine); "Vondel as Translator," in Tydschrift (magazine) Voor Nederlandsche Taal en Letterkunde (1894); "Vondel's Self-Criticism," same magazine (1895); "Origin and Growth of Vondel's Poems," same magazine (1896).

VONDEL AND MILTON. August Müller. 1864.

ÜBER MILTON'S ABHÄNGIGKEIT VON VONDEL. Berlin, 1891.

MILTON AND VONDEL: A Curiosity of Literature. George Edmundson, M.A. Trübner & Co., London, 1885.

VONDEL AND MILTON. Edmund W. Gosse. "Northern Studies." Also in "Littell's Living Age," vol. cxxxiii., page 500; and in the "Academy," vol. xxxviii., page 613.

David Haek (1854). JUSTUS VON DEN VONDEL: ein betrag zur geschichte des Niederländischen schriftthums. Hamburg, 1890.

WORKS OF VONDEL, twelve volumes, in association with his life, by Jacob van Lennep.

VONDEL'S LUCIFER. Agnes Repplier. "Catholic World," vol. xlii., page 959.

"Praecipitemque immani turbine adegit"

J. van Vondel's

Lucifer

A tragedy

1654

DEDICATION.

To the invincible Prince and Lord, the Lord Ferdinand the Third, elected Emperor of Rome, Perpetual Increaser of the Empire.

As the Divine Majesty is throned amid unapproachable splendors, so, too, the Sovran Powers of the world, which owe their lustre to God, and are made in the image of the Godhead, are seated on high, crowned with glory. But as the Godhead, or, rather, the Supreme Goodness, favors the least and most humble with access to His throne, so, too, doth the temporal power deem its most insignificant subject worthy to kneel reverentially at its feet.

Inspired with this hope, my muse is encouraged from afar to dedicate to your Imperial Majesty this Tragedy of Lucifer, whose style demands a most liberal degree of that gravity and stateliness of which the poet speaks:

"Omne genus scripti gravitate Tragoedia vincit."

"Sublime in style and deep in tone, The tragic art doth stand alone."

Though whatever of the requisite sublimity may be wanting in the style will be compensated by the subject of the drama, and the title, name, and eminence of the personage who, the mirror of all ungrateful and ambitious ones, doth here invest the tragic scene, the Heavens; from which he, who once presumed to sit by the side of God, and thought to become His equal, was cast, and justly condemned to eternal darkness.

This unhappy example of Lucifer, the Archangel, and at one time the most glorious of all the Angels, has since been followed, through nearly all the centuries, by various rebellious usurpers, of which both ancient and modern histories bear witness, showing how violence, cunning, and the wily plots of the wicked, disguised beneath a show and pretext of lawfulness, are idle and powerless so long as God's Providence protects the anointed Powers and Dynasties, to the peace and safety of divers states, which, without a lawful supreme head, could not exist in civil intercourse. Therefore, God's Oracle Himself, for the good of mankind, by one word identified the Sovran Power as His own, when He commanded that to God and to Caesar should be rendered the things that to each were due.

Christendom, so often attacked on every side, and at present beset by Turk and Tartar, like unto a ship on a stormy sea, in danger of ship-wreck, demands to the highest degree this universal reverence for the Empire, that thereby the hereditary foe of Christ's name may be repulsed, and that the Realm and its frontiers may be strengthened and rendered safe against the incursions of his savage hordes; wherefore it behooves us to praise God that it pleased Him to continue the Authority and the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, at the last Imperial Diet, before his father's death, in the son, Ferdinand the Fourth, a blessing which has filled so many nations with courage, and which causes the tragic trumpet of our Netherland Muse to sound more boldly before the throne of the High Germans concerning the vanquished Lucifer, borne along in Michael's triumph.

Your Imperial Majesty's Most humble servant,

J.V. VONDEL.

ON HIS MAJESTY'S PORTRAIT

On the Portrait of His Imperial Majesty. Ferdinand the Third.

When Joachim Sandrart van Stokou, out of Vienna, in Austria, honored me with his Majesty's portrait, adorned with festoons and other ornaments.

_Deus nobis haec otia fecit._

The Sun of Austria uplifts his glorious rays From shadow-glooms of art to bless each wondering eye. Behold him on his throne, high towering in the sky! Nor doth he scorn to beam on all his glance surveys.

Good Ferdinand the Third, born for the sovran crown. A Father of the Peace, a new Augustus, shows His Son the heights whereon the heavenly palace glows; And teaches how with arms of Peace to win renown.

How blest the mighty realm, how blest their destinies, O'er which his gracious eyes keep sleepless vigils kind. And where he holds the Scales for holy Justice blind! An Eagle brought him sword and sceptre from the skies.

A crown adorns the head which empires grand engage: This Head adorns the Crown, and makes a golden age.

VONDEL'S FOREWORD

A Word to All Fellow-Academicians and Patrons of the Drama.

To reïnkindle your zeal for art, and at the same time to edify and to quicken your spirit, the holy tragic scene, which represents the Heavens, is here presented to your view.

The great Archangels. Lucifer and Michael, each strengthened by his followers, come on the stage, and play their parts.

The stage and the actors are, in sooth, of such nature, and so glorious, that they demand a grander style and higher buskins than I know how to put on. No one who understands the speech of the infallible oracles of the Holy Spirit will judge that we present here the story of Salmoneus, who, in Elis, mounted upon his chariot, while defying Jupiter, and imitating his thunder and lightning by riding over a brazen bridge, holding a burning torch, was slain by a thunderbolt.

Nor do we renew here the grey fable of the war of the Titans, in which disguise Poesy sought to make its auditors forget their reckless presumption and godless sacrilege, and to acquire a knowledge of nature instead; namely, that the air and the winds, locked within the hollow belly and the sulphurous bowels of the earth, seeking, at times, an outlet, accompanied by the violence of bursting rocks, and by smoke and steam and flames and earthquakes and dreadful mutterings, are vomited, and, rising heavenwards, again descend, strewing and heaping the surface of land and sea with stones and ashes.

Among the Prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel assure us of the fall of the Archangel and his faction. In the Evangelist, Christ, truest of all oracles, with His voice, out of the Heavens, enjoins us to hear; and finally, Judas Thaddeus, His faithful apostle; which parables are worthy to be engraved in eternal diamond, and, more worthy still, upon our hearts.

Isaiah cries: "How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning! How art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations!

"And thou saidst in thy heart, I will ascend to Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north:

"I will ascend above the height of the clouds. I will be like the Most High.

"But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit."

God speaks through Ezekiel thus: "Thou wast the seal of resemblance, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. Thou wast in the pleasures of the paradise of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite and the onyx and the beryl, the sapphire and the carbuncle and the emerald; gold was thy adornment. Thy pipes were prepared in the day thou wast created. Thou didst spread thyself like an overshadowing cherub, and I set thee on the mountain of God. Thou didst walk in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day of thy creation, until iniquity was found in thee."

Both of these parables are spoken, the one of the King of Babylon, the other of the King of Tyre, who, like unto Lucifer in pride and in splendor, were threatened and punished.

Jesus Christ refers to the fall of the rebellious Lucifer, where he says: "I saw Satan like lightning falling from Heaven."

And Thaddeus reveals the fall of the Angels and their crime, and the punishments which followed thereon, without any palliation, briefly, in this manner: "And the Angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved with everlasting chains of darkness unto the judgment of the great God."

Stayed by these golden sayings, and in particular by that of Judas Thaddeus, disciple of the Heavenly Teacher and Ambassador from the King of kings, we receive, as upon a shield of adamant, the darts of the unbelieving who would dare to cast a doubt upon the fall of the Angels.

Besides this, we are strongly supported throughout the whole period of antiquity by the most illustrious of the devout Church Fathers, who, in respect to the plot of this history, are unanimously agreed: though, lest we detain our Academic friends, we shall be content to cite only three places, the first taken out of the holy Cyprian, Bishop and martyr at Carthage, where he writes: "When he who was formerly throned in angelic majesty and accounted worthy by God and pleasing in his sight, saw man, made in God's own image, he burst into malicious hate; not, however, causing him to fall by poisoning him with this hatred, ere he himself was thereby also undone--himself made captive ere he captured, and ruined ere he brought him to ruin. While he, spurred on by envy, robbed man of the grace of immortality once given him, he himself also lost all that he had before possessed,"

The great Gregory furnishes us the second quotation: "The rebellious Angel, created to shine preëminent among hosts of Angels, is through his pride brought to such a fall that he now remains subject to the dominion of the loyal Angels."

The third and last evidence we cull from the sermons of the mellifluous St. Bernard: "Shun pride; I pray you, shun it. The source of all transgression is pride, which hath overcast Lucifer himself, shining most splendidly amongst the stars, with eternal darkness. Not only an Angel, but the chief among Angels, it hath changed into a Devil."

Pride and envy, the two causes or inciters of this horrible conflagration of discord and battle, are represented by us as a team of starred animals, the Lion and the Dragon, which, harnessed to Lucifer's battle-chariot, carry him against God and Michael; seeing that these animals are types of these two deadly sins. For the Lion, king of beasts, encouraged by his strength, in his vanity, thinks no one above him; and envy injures the envied from afar, even as the Dragon wounds his enemy a long way off by shooting poison [from his tongue].

St. Augustine, ascribing these two deadly sins to Lucifer, pictures the nature of the same most vividly, saying that pride is a love of one's own greatness; but envy is a hatred of another's happiness, the outcome of which seems clear enough. "For each one," says he, "who loves his own greatness envies his equals, inasmuch as they stand as high as he; or envies his inferiors, lest they become his equals; or his superiors, because they are above him."

Now, since the beasts themselves were abused and possessed by the damned Spirits, as in the beginning the Paradise Serpent, and in the holy age the herd of swine, that with a loud noise was precipitated into the sea, and since, also, the constellations are pictured on the Heavens in the forms of animals, as hath been thought even by the Prophets, as the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, and Arcturus, Orion, and Lucifer; so may it please you to overlook the elaborateness and the didacticism of this drama, if the unfortunate Spirits upon our stage, by means of the same, help and defend themselves: for to the infernal monsters nothing is more natural than cunning traits and the abuse of all creatures and elements, to the prejudice of the name and honor of the Most High, so far as He shall this permit.

St. John, in his Revelation, typifies the heavenly mysteries and the war in Heaven by the Dragon, whose tail drew after him a third part of the stars, supposed by the theologians to refer to the fallen Angels; wherefore in Poetry the flowered manner of expression should not be examined too narrowly, nor regulated by the subtlety of the schools.

We should also make distinction between the two kinds of characters who contend on this stage; namely, the bad and the good Angels, each kind playing its own rôle, even as Cicero and our inborn sense of verisimilitude teach us to picture each character according to his rank and nature.

At the same time we by no means deny that holy subject matter restrains and binds the dramatist more closely than worldly histories or pagan fables, notwithstanding that ancient and famous motto of the poets, expressed by Horatius Flaccus in his "Art of Poetry" in these lines:

"The painter and the bard did both this power receive, To aid their art with all that they of use believe."

Though here it is especially noteworthy to state how we, in order to inflame the hate of the proud and envious Spirits the more strongly, did cause the mystery of the future incarnation of the Word to be partially revealed to the Angels by the Archangel Gabriel, Ambassador from God, and Herald of His Mysteries; herein to improve the matter, following not the opinion of the majority of the theologians, but only of a few, because this furnished our tragic picture richer material and more lustre. However, neither in this point nor in other circumstances of cause, time, place, and manner (which we employed to render this tragedy more powerful, more glorious, more natural, and more instructive) has it been our purpose to obscure the orthodox truth, or to establish anything after our own finding or notion.

St. Paul, the revealer of God's mysteries to the Hebrews, extols most enviably--even to the prejudice of the kingdom of the lying and tempting Spirits--the glory, might, and Godhead of the Incarnate Word, preëminent among all Angels in name, in sonship, and in heirship; in the adoration of the Angels; in His unction; in His exaltation at God's right hand; and in the eternity of His rulership as a king over the coming world, as the cause and the end of all things, and as the crowned Head of men and Angels: while the Angels, His worshippers, God's messengers, as ministering Spirits, are sent to serve man, the heir of salvation, whose nature God's Son, passing the Angels by, hath taken upon Himself in the blood of Abraham.

By occasion of this justification, I do not deem it unsuitable here, in passing, to say a few words in vindication of those dramas and dramatists that employ Biblical subjects, inasmuch as they have, occasionally, come into reproach; since, forsooth, human tastes are so various; for a difference in temperament causes the same subject to be agreeable to one which is repulsive to another.

All honorable arts and customs have their supporters and opponents, also their proper use and abuse. The holy writers of tragedy have, among the ancient Hebrews, for their example, the poet Ezekiel, who has left us, in Greek, the exodus of the twelve tribes from Egypt. Among the reverend Church Fathers, they have that bright star out of the East, Gregory of Nazianzus, who, in Greek dramatic verse, hath pictured the Crucified Saviour Himself; as also, not long since, we became indebted to the Royal Ambassador, Hugo Grotius, that great light of the learning and piety of our age, who, following in the track of St. Gregory, hath given us the Crucified One in Latin, for which immortal and edifying labor we owe him both honor and thankfulness.

Among the English Protestants, the learned pen of Richard Baker hath discoursed very freely in prose concerning Lucifer and all the acts of the rebellious Spirits.

It is true that the Fathers of the Ancient Church banished the Christian actors from the community of the Church, and that from that time forth they were strongly opposed to the drama. But let us take into consideration the time and the fact that their reasons for this were far different. At that period the world, in many places, was yet deeply sunken in heathenish idolatry. The foundations of Christianity were not yet well established, and the dramas were played in honor of Cybele, a great goddess and mother of their imagined gods, and were esteemed a serviceable expedient with which to avert the land plagues from the bodies of the people.

St. Augustine testifies how a heathen archpriest, a minister of Numa's ritual and idol service, on account of a deadly pest, first instituted the drama at Rome, sanctioning it by his authority.

Scaliger himself acknowledges that it was established for the health of the people by order of the Sibyls, so that these plays became a truly powerful incentive to the blind idolatry of the heathen, extolling their gods--a cankering abomination, whose destruction cost the first heroes of the Cross and the long-struggling Church so much sweat and blood; but being now long extirpated, hath left in Europe not a vestige behind.

That the holy old Church Fathers, therefore, for these reasons, and also because of their corrupting the public morals, and various open and shameless customs, as the employment of naked boys, women, and maidens, and other obscenities, should rebuke these plays, was needful and commendable, as, in that case, would also be so now. This being considered, let us not hold the good and the usefulness of edifying and entertaining plays too lightly.

Holy and honorable examples serve as a mirror, reflecting for our edification all virtue and piety, and teaching us, at the same time, to shun wickedness and its consequent misery.

The purpose and design of true tragedy is through terror and sympathy to stir the spectators to tenderness. Through the drama, students and growing youth are cultivated in the languages, eloquence, wisdom, modesty, good morals and manners; and these sink into their tender hearts and are impressed upon their senses, conducing towards habits of propriety and discretion, which remain with them, and to which they adhere even until old age; yea, it occurs, at times, that erratic geniuses, not to be bent or diverted by ordinary methods, are touched by this subtle art and by an exalted dramatic style, thus influenced beyond their own suspicion; even as a delicate lyre-string gives forth an answering sound when its companion string, of the same kind and nature, of a similar tone, and strung on another lyre, is caressed by a skilled hand, which, while playing, can drive the turbulent spirit out of a possessed and hardened Saul.

The history of the early Church seals this with the noteworthy examples of Genesius and Ardaleo, both actors, enlightened in the theatre by the Holy Ghost, and there converted; for they, while playing, wishing to mock the Christian Religion, were convicted of the truth, which they had learned out of their serious rôles, filled with the pith of wisdom, rather than with trifling discourse to be mouthed for hours into the air and more vexatious than instructive.

They tell us in regard to Biblical subject matter that we should not _play_ with holy things, and, indeed, this seems to have some show of plausibility in our language, which hath given us the word _play_; but he that can stammer but a word or two of Greek knows that among the Greeks and Latins this word was not used in this sense; for _τραγῳδία_ is a compound word, and really means a goat-song, after the lyric contests of the shepherds, instituted for the purpose of winning a goat by singing, in which custom the tragic songs, and, following them, dramatic plays, took their origin. And if one would, nevertheless, unmercifully bring us to task on account of this word _play_, what then shall be done with organ _play_, David's harp and song _play_, and the _play_ on the instrument with ten strings, and the other kinds of play on flute and stringed instruments, introduced by various sects among the Protestants into their meetings?

He, then, who appreciates this distinction will, while condemning the abuses of the dramatic art, not be ungracious towards the proper use of the same; nor will he begrudge the youth and the art-loving burghers this glorious, yea, this divine, invention, to them an honorable recreation and a refreshing amelioration of the trials of life; so that we, hereby encouraged, may with greater zeal bring Lucifer upon the stage, where he, finally smitten by God's thunderbolt, plunges down into hell--the mirror clear of all ungrateful ambitious ones who audaciously dare to exalt themselves, setting themselves against the consecrated Powers and Majesties and their lawful superiors.

Lucifer

The Argument

Lucifer, the Archangel, chief and most illustrious of all the Angels, proud and ambitious, out of blind self-love envied God His boundless greatness; he also became jealous of man, made in God's image, to whom, in his delightful Paradise, was entrusted the sovereignty of earth.

He envied God and man the more when Gabriel, God's Herald, proclaiming all Angels to be but ministering Spirits, revealed the mysteries of God's future incarnation, whereby, the Angels being passed by, the real nature of man, united with the Godhead, might expect a power and majesty equal to God's own. Wherefore, the proud and envious Spirit, attempting to place himself on an equality with God, and to keep man out of Heaven, through his accomplices, incited to arms innumerable Angels, and led them, notwithstanding Rafael's warning, against Michael. Heaven's Field-marshal, and his legions; and ceasing the fight, after his defeat, he caused, out of revenge, the first man, and in him all his descendants, to fall, while he himself, with all his co-rebels, was plunged into hell and eternal damnation.

The scene is in the Heavens.

Dramatis Personæ.

BELZEBUB, } BELIAL, } Rebellious Chiefs. APOLLION, } GABRIEL, God's Herald of Mysteries. CHORUS OF ANGELS. LUCIFER, Stadtholder. LUCIFERIANS, Seditious Spirits. MICHAEL, Field-marshal. RAFAEL, Guardian Angel. URIEL, Michael's Armor-bearer.

Lucifer.