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.