CAREL

VOSMAER (1826-1888)  , Dutch poet and art-critic, was born at the Hague on the 2cth of March 1826 . He was trained to the law, and held various judiciary posts, but in 1873 withdrew entirely from legal practice . His first volume of poems, 186o, did not contain much that was remarkable . His temperament was starved in the very thin air of the intellectual Holland of those days, and it was not until after the sensational appearance of Multatuli (Edward Douwes-Dekker) that Vosmaer, at the age of forty, woke up to a consciousness of his own talent . In 1869 he produced an exhaustive monograph on Rembrandt, which was issued in French . Vosmaer became a contributor to, and then the leading spirit and editor of, a journal which played an immense part in the awakening of Dutch literature; this was the Nederlandsche Spectator, in which a great many of his own works, in prose and verse, originally appeared . The remarkable miscellanies of Vosmaer, called Birds of Diverse Plumage, appeared in three volumes, in 1872, 1874 and 1876 . In 1879 he selected from these all the pieces in verse, and added other poems to them . In 1881 he published an archaeological novel called Amazone, the scene of which was laid in Naples and Rome, and which described the raptures of a Dutch antiquary in love . Vosmaer undertook the gigantic task of translating Homer into Dutch hexameters, and he lived just long enough to see this completed and revised . In 1873 he came to London to visit his lifelong friend, Sir (then Mr) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and on his return published Londinias, an exceedingly brilliant mock-heroic poem in hexameters . His last poem was Nanno, an idyll on the Greek model .

Vosmaer died, while travelling in

Switzerland, on the 12th of June 1888 . He was unique in his fine sense of plastic expression; he was eminently tasteful, lettered, relined . Without being a genius, he possessed immense talent, just of the order to be useful in combating the worn-out rhetoric of Dutch poetry . His verse was modelled on Heine and still more on the Greeks; it is sober, without colour, stately and a little cold . He was a curious student in versification, and it is due to him that hexameters were introduced and the sonnet reintroduced into Holland . He was the first to repudiate the traditional, wooden alexandrine . In prose he was greatly influenced by Multatuli, in praise of whom he wrote an eloquent treatise, Een Zaaier (A Sower) . He was also some-what under the influence of English prose models . (E .