Dowered with all skill that sons of light inherit,
Whose wit and power our earth with heaven have shared?
Sept. 3, 1616.
Note 1. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581–1647), the celebrated Dutch poet and historian, whose Castle of Muidea was for nearly forty years the centre of literary and artistic activity in Holland, was the earliest Dutch sonnet-writer. He first imitated Petrarch, and introduced Italian poetry to the attention of his countrymen, after his famous journey to the south of Europe in 1599. Vondel, the greatest of Dutch poets, wrote a few sonnets, but they are harsh and tuneless compositions. The sonnet has been almost, if not entirely, unattempted in recent Dutch literature. [back]
