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, refined. 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 greatly influenced by Multatuli, in praise of whom he wrote an eloquent treatise, Een Zaaier (A Sower). He was also somewhat under the influence of English prose models. (E. G.)
VOSS, JOHANN HEINRICH (1751-1826), German poet and translator, was born at Sommersdorf in Mecklenburg-Strelitz on the 20th of February 1751, the son of a farmer. After attending (1766-69) the gymnasium at Neubrandenburg, he was obliged to accept a private tutorship in order to earn money to enable him to study at a university. At the invitation of H. C. Boie, whose attention he had attracted by poems contributed to the Göttingen Musenalmanach, he went to Göttingen in 1772. Here he studied philology and became one of the leading spirits in the famous Hain or Dichterbund. In 1775 Boie made over to him the editorship of the Musenalmanach, which he continued to issue for several years. He married Boie's sister Ernestine in 1777 and in 1778 was appointed rector of the school at Otterndorf in Hanover. In 1782 he accepted the rectorship of the gymnasium at Eutin, where he remained until 1802. Retiring in this year with a pension of 600 thalers he settled at Jena, and in 1805, although Goethe used his utmost endeavours to persuade him to stay, accepted a call to a professorship at Heidelberg. Here, in the enjoyment of a considerable salary, he devoted himself entirely to his literary labours, translations and antiquarian research until his death on the 29th of March 1826.
Voss was a man of a remarkably independent and vigorous character. In 1785-95 he published in two volumes a collection of original poems, to which he afterwards made many additions. The best of these works is his idyllic poem Luise (1795), in which he sought, with much success, to apply the style and methods of classical poetry to the expression of modern German thought and sentiment. In his Mythologische Briefe (2 vols., 1794), in which he attacked the ideas of Christian Gottlob Heyne, in his Antisymbolik (2 vols., 1824-26), written in opposition to Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858), and in other writings he made important contributions to the study of mythology. He was also prominent as an advocate of the right of free judgment in religion, and at the time when some members of the Romantic school were being converted to the Roman Catholic church he produced a strong impression by a powerful article, in Sophronizon, on his friend Friedrich von Stolberg's repudiation of Protestantism (1819). It is, however, as a translator that Voss chiefly owes his place in German literature. His translations indicate not only sound scholarship but a thorough mastery of the laws of German diction and rhythm. The most famous of his translations are those of Homer. Of these the best is the translation of the Odyssey, as originally issued in 1781. He also translated Hesiod, Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius and other classical poets, and he prepared a critical edition of Tibullus. In 1818-29 was published, in 9 vols., a translation of Shakespeare's plays, which he completed with the help of his sons Heinrich and Abraham, both of whom were scholars and writers of considerable ability.
J. H. Voss's Sämtliche poetische Werke were published by his son Abraham in 1835; new ed. 1850. A good selection is in A. Sauer, Der Göttinger Dichterbund, vol. i. (Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vol. 49, 1887). His Letters were also published by his son in 4 vols. (1829-33). Voss left a short autobiography, Abriss meines Lebens (1818). See also W. Herbst, J. H. Voss (3 vols., 1872-76); A. Heussner, J. H. Voss als Schulmann in Eutin (1882).
VOSS, RICHARD (1851-), German dramatist and novelist, was born at Neugrape, in Pomerania, on the 2nd of September 1851, the son of a country squire. Though intended for the life of a country gentleman, he showed no inclination for outdoor life, and on his return from the war of 1870-71, in which he was wounded, he studied philosophy at Jena and Munich, and then settled at Berchtesgaden. In 1884 Voss was appointed by the grand duke of Weimar librarian of the Wartburg, but, in consequence of illness, he resigned the post.
Chief among his dramas are Savonarola (1878); Magda (1879); Die Patricierin (1880); Der Mohr des Zaren (1883); Unehrlich Volk (1885); Alexandra (1888); Eva (1889); Wehe dem Besiegten (1889); Die neue Zeil (1891); Schuldig (1892). Among his novels may be mentioned San Sebastian (1883); Der Sohn der Volskerin (1885); Die Sabinerin (1888); Der Mönch von Berchtesgaden (1891); Der neue Gott (1898); Die Rächerin (1899); Allerlei Erlebtes (1902); and Die Leute von Valdaré (1902).
See M. Goldmann, Richard Voss, ein literarisches Charakterbild (1900).
VOSSEVANGEN, or Voss, a village and favourite tourist-centre of Norway, in South Bergenhus amt (county), 67 m. N.W. of Bergen by rail. It was the terminus of the finely engineered Bergen & Vossevangen railway, which, however, forms part of the projected trunk line between Christiania and Bergen. Vossevangen is pleasantly situated on the Vangsvand, in fertile upland, and has a stone church of the 13th century, and a finneloft or two-storeyed timber house of the 14th century, with an outside stair. Driving roads run N.E. and S.E. from Vossevangen. The former, passing Stalheim, descends into the sombre Naerödal, a precipitous valley terminating in the Naerö Fjord, a head-branch of the Sogne Fjord. The latter route follows the deep but gentler valley of the Skjerve, whence from Övre Vasenden roads continue to Eide (18 m.) and to Ulvik (32 m.), both on branches of the Hardanger Fjord.
VOSSIUS [Voss], GERHARD JOHANN (1577-1649), German classical scholar and theologian, was the son of Johannes Voss, a Protestant of the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Palatinate and became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerhard was born. Johannes was a Calvinist, however, and the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him once more to become a wanderer; in 1578 he settled at Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dort, where he died in 1585. Here the son received his education, until in 1595 he entered the university of Leiden, where he became the lifelong friend of Hugo Grotius, and studied classics, Hebrew, church history and theology. In 1600 he was made rector of the high school at Dort, and devoted himself to philology and historical theology. From 1614 to 1619 he was director of the theological college at Leiden. Meantime he was gaining a great reputation as a scholar, not only in the Netherlands, but also in France and England. But in spite of the moderation of his views and his abstention from controversy, he came under suspicion of heresy, and escaped expulsion from his office only by resignation (1619). The year before he had published his valuable history of Pelagian controversies, which his enemies considered favoured the views of the Arminians or Remonstrants. In 1622, however, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and chronology, and subsequently of Greek, in the university. He declined invitations from Cambridge, but accepted from Archbishop Laud a prebend in Canterbury cathedral without residence, and went to England to be installed in 1629, when he was made LL.D. at Oxford. In 1632 he left Leiden to take the post of professor of history in the newly founded Athenaeum at Amsterdam, which he held till his death on the 19th of March 1649.
His son Isaak (1618-1689), after a brilliant career of scholarship in Sweden, became residentiary canon at Windsor in 1673. He was the author of De septuaginta interpretibus (1661), De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi (1673), and Variarum observationum liber (1685).
Vossius was amongst the first to treat theological dogmas and the heathen religions from the historical point of view. His principal works are Historia Pelagiana sive Historiae de controversiis quas Pelagius ejusque reliquiae moverunt (1618); Aristarchus, sive de arte grammatica (1635 and 1695; new ed. in 2 vols., 1833-35); Etymologicum linguae Latinae (1662; new ed. in two vols., 1762-63);
