BEETS, NIKOLAAS (1814-1903), Dutch poet, was born at Haarlem, and constant references in his poems and sketches show how deeply the beauty of that town and its neighbourhood impressed his imagination. In his youth Beets was carried away on the tide of Byronism, which was then sweeping over Europe, and his early works Jose (1834), Kuser (1835) and Guy de Vlaming (183 7) are of the most impassioned type. But he was beginning in prose the composite work of humour and observation which has made him famous, and which certainly had nothing in the least Byronic about it. This was the celebrated Camera Obscura (1839), the most successful imaginative work which any Dutchman of the 19th century produced. This work, published under the pseudonym of "Hildebrand," goes back in its earliest inception to the year 1835 and consists of complete short stories, descriptive sketches and studies of peasant life—filled with hu mour and pathos. In middle life he published collections of verse —Cornflowers (1853) and New Poems (1857)—in which the romantic melancholy was found to have disappeared, and to have left in its place a gentle sentiment and a depth of religious feeling. In 1873-75 Beets collected his works in three volumes.