Vondel's Lucifer Author:Joost van den Vondel General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: Continental Publishing Co. Subjects: Art / Clip Art Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) Art / Design / General Art / Design / Book Art / Design / Decorative Juvenile Nonfiction / Poetry / General Poetry / American / Genera... more »l Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Che "Cucifer." " 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. HE 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 Spanishmonk Dracontius, the Biblical paraphrases of the old English poet Caedmon, 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 ...« less