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.
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.