IIHENRY VAUGHAN1621-1695

IN his own person, Henry Vaughan left no trace in society. His life seemed to slip by like the running water on which he was forever gazing and moralizing, and his memory met early with the fate which he hardly foresaw. Descended from the royal chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus mentions, and whose abode, in the day of Roman domination, was in the district called Siluria,[20]he called himself the Silurist upon his title-pages; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of epitaphs, close by his home in the glorious valley of the Usk and the little Honddu, under the shadow of Tretower, the ruined castle of his race, and of Pen-y-Fanand his kindred peaks. What we know of him is a sort of pastoral: how he was born, the son of a poor gentleman, in 1621, at Newton St. Bridget, in the old house yet asleep on the road between Brecon and Crickhowel; how he went up to Oxford, Laud’s Oxford, with Thomas, his twin, as a boy of sixteen, to be entered at Jesus College;[21]how he took his degree (just where and when no one can discover), and came back, after a London revel, to be the village physician, though he was meant for the law, in what had become his brother’s parish of Llansantffraed; to write books full of sequestered beauty, to watch the most tragic of wars, to look into the faces of love and loss, and to spend his thoughtful age on the bowery banks of the river he had always known, hisIsca parens florum, towhich he consecrated many a sweet English line. And the ripple of the not unthankful Usk was “distinctly audible over its pebbles,” as was the Tweed to the failing sense of Sir Walter, in the room where Henry Vaughan drew his last breath, on St. George’s day, April 23, 1695. He died exactly seventy-nine years after Shakespeare, exactly one hundred and fifty-five years before Wordsworth.

Circumstances had their way with him, as with most poets. He knew the touch of disappointment and renunciation, not only in life, but in his civic hopes and in his art. He broke his career in twain, and began over, before he had passed thirty; and he showed great æsthetic discretion, as well as disinterestedness, in replacing his graceful early verses by the deep dedications of his prime. Religious faith and meditation seem so much part of his innermost nature, it is a little difficult to remember that Vaughan considered himself a brand snatched from the burning, a lawless Cavalier brought by the best of chances to the quiet life, and the feet of the moral Muse. He sufferedmost of the time between 1643 and 1651 from a sorely protracted and nearly fatal illness; and during its progress his wife and his dearest friends were taken from him. Nor was the execution of the King a light event to so sensitive a poet and so passionate a partisan. Meanwhile Vaughan read George Herbert, and his theory of proportional values began to change. It was a season of transition and silent crises, when men bared their breasts to great issues, and when it was easy for a childlike soul,

“Weary of her vain search below, above,In the first Fair to find the immortal Love.”[22]

Vaughan, in his new fervor, did his best to suppress the numbers written in his youth, thus clearing the field for what he afterwards called his “hagiography”; and a critic may wonder what he found in his first tiny volume of 1646, or inOlor Iscanus, to regret or cancel. Every unbaptized song is “bright only in its owninnocence, and kindles nothing but a generous thought”; and one of them, at least, has a manly postlude of love and resolve worthy of the free lyres of Lovelace and Montrose. Vaughan, unlike other ardent spirits of his class, had nothing very gross to be sorry for; if he was, indeed, one of his own

“feverish souls,Sick with a scarf or glove,”

“feverish souls,

Sick with a scarf or glove,”

he had none but noble ravings. Happily, his very last verses,Thalia Rediviva, breaking as it were by accident a silence of twenty-three years, indorse with cheerful gallantry the accents of his youth. The turn in his life which brought him lasting peace, in a world rocking between the cant of the Parliament and resurgent audacity and riot, achieved for us a body of work which, small as it is, has rare interest, and an out-of-door beauty, as of the natural dusk, “breathless with adoration,” which is almost without parallel. Eternity has been known to spoil a poet for time, but not in this instance. Never did religion and art interchange a morefortunate service, outside Italian studios. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions, Vaughan’s voice grew at once freer and more forceful. In him a marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual readjustment, even as it did, three centuries later, in one greater than he, John Henry Newman.

Vaughan’s work is thickly sown with personalities, but they are so delicate and involved that there is little profit in detaching them. What record he made at the University is not apparent; nor is it at all sure that so independent and speculative a mind applied itself gracefully to the curriculum. He was, in the only liberal sense, a learned man, full of life-long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden Tree. His lines beginning

“Quite spent with thought I left my cell”

show the acutest thirst for hidden knowledge; he would “most gladly die,” if death might buy him intellectual growth. He looks forward to eternity as to the unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. Hemakes the soul sing joyously to the body:

“I that here saw darkly, in a glass,But mists and shadows pass,And by their own weak shine did search the springsAnd source of things,Shall, with inlighted rays,Pierce all their ways!”

With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:

“Who circled inCorruption with this glorious ring?”

What Vaughan does know is nothing to him; when he salutes the Bodleian from his heart, he is thinking how little honey he has gathered from that vast hive, and how little it contains, when measured with what there is to learn from living and dying. He had small respect for the sinister sciences among which the studies of his beloved brother, a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no pedant, he dearly loved to get in a slap against the ignorant whom we have always with us. At twenty-five, he printed a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juvenal,and flourished his wit, in the preface, at the expense of some possible gentle reader of the parliamentary persuasion who would “quarrel with antiquitie.” “These, indeed, may think that they have slept out so many centuries in this Satire, and are now awaked; which had it been still Latin, perhaps their nap had been everlasting!”

He was an optimist, proven through much personal trial; he had sympathy with the lower animals, and preserved a humorous deference towards all things alive, even the leviathan of Holy Writ, which he affectionately exalts into “the shipmen’s fear” and “the comely spacious whale”! Vaughan adored his friends; he had a unique veneration for childhood; his adjective for the admirable and beautiful, whether material or immaterial, is “dear”; and his mind dwelt with habitual fondness on what Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his own heart) calls “incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.”

His occupation as a resident physicianmust have fostered his fine eye and ear for the green earth, and furnished him, day by day, with musings in sylvan solitudes, and rides abroad over the fresh hill-paths. The breath of the mountains is about his books. An early riser, he uttered a constant invocation to whomever would listen, that

“Manna was not goodAfter sun-rising; far-day sullies flowers.”

He was hospitable on a limited income.[23]His verses of invitationTo his Retired Friend, which are not without their thrusts at passing events, have a classic jollity fit to remind the reader of Randolph’s ringing ode to Master Anthony Stafford. Again and again Vaughan reiterates the Socratic and Horatian song of content: that he has enough landsand money, that there are a thousand things he does not want, that he is blessed in what he has. All this does not prevent him from recording the phenomenal ebb-tides of his purse, and from whimsically synthesizing on “the threadbare, goldless genealogie” of bards! No sour zealot in anything, he enjoyed an evening now and then at the Globe Tavern in London, where he consumed his sack with relish, that he might be “possessor of more soul,” and “after full cups have dreams poetical.” But he was no lover of the town. Country life was his joy and pride; the only thing which seemed, in his own most vivid phrase, to “fill his breast with home.”

“Here something still like Eden looks!Honey in woods, juleps in brooks.”

A literary acquaintance, one unrecognized N. W., congratulates Vaughan that he is able to “give his Muse the swing in an hereditary shade.” He translated with great gustoThe Old Man of Verona, out of Claudian, and Guevara’sHappiness of Country Life;and he notes withsatisfaction that Abraham was of his rural mind, in “Mamre’s holy grove.” Vaughan was an angler, need it be added? Nay, the autocrat of anglers: he was a salmon-catcher.

With “the charity which thinketh no evil,” he loved almost everything, except the Jesuits, and his ogres the Puritans. For Vaughan knew where he stood, and his opinion of Puritanism never varied. He kept his snarls and satires, for the most part, hedged within his prose, the proper ground of the animosities. When he put on his singing-robes, he tried to forget, not always with success, his spites and bigotries. For his life, he could not help sidelong glances, stings, strictures between his teeth, thistle-down hints cast abroad in the neatest of generalities:

“Who saint themselves, they are no saints!”

The introduction to hisMount of Olives(whose pages have a soft billowy music like Jeremy Taylor’s) is nominally inscribed to “the peaceful, humble, and pious reader.” That functionary musthave found it a trial to preserve his peaceful and pious abstraction, while the peaceful and pious author proceeded to flout the existing government, in a towering rage, and in very elegant caustic English. Vaughan was none too godly to be a thorough hater. He was genially disposed to the pretensions of every human creature; he refused to consider his ancestry and nurture by themselves, as any guarantee of the justice of his views or of his superior insight into affairs. Yet in spite of his enforced Quaker attitude during the clash of arms, he nursed in that gentle bosom the heartiest loathing of democracy, and shared the tastes of a certain clerk of the Temple “who never could be brought to write Oliver with a great O.” It is fortunate that he did not spoil himself, as Wither did, upon the wheels of party, for politics were his most vehement concern. Had he been richer, as he tells us in a playful passage, nothing on earth would have kept him from meddling with national issues.

The poets, save the greatest, Milton,his friend Andrew Marvell, and Wither, rallied in a bright group under the royal standard. Those among them who did not fight were commonly supposed, as was Drummond of Hawthornden, to redeem their reputation by dying of grief at the overthrow of the King. Yet Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did not die of grief. It is so sure that he suffered some privation, and it may be imprisonment, for his allegiance, that shrewd guessers, before now, have equipped him and placed him in the ranks of the losing cause, where he might have had choice company. His generous erratic brother (a writer of some note, an alchemist, an Orientalist, a Rosicrucian, who was ejected from his vicarage in 1654, and died either of the plague, or of inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Albury, in 1665, while the court was at Oxford)[24]had been a recruit, and a brave one. But Henry Vaughan explicitly tellsus, in hisAd Posteros, and in a prayer in the second part ofSilex Scintillans, that he had no personal share in the constitutional struggle, that he shed no blood. Again he cries, in a third lyric,

“O acceptOf his vowed heart, whom Thou hast keptFrom bloody men!”

This painstaking record of a fact by one so loyal as he goes far to prove, to an inductive mind not thoroughly familiar with his circumstances, that he considered war the worst of current evils, and was willing, for this first principle of his philosophy, to lay himself open to the charge, not indeed of cowardice (was he not a Vaughan?), but of lack of appreciation for the one romantic opportunity of his life. His withdrawal from the turmoil which so became his colleagues may seem to harmonize with his known moral courage and right sentiment; and fancy is ready to fasten on him the sad neutrality, and the passionate “ingemination” for “peace, peace,” which “took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart,” such as Clarendon tellsus of in his beautiful passage touching the young Lord Falkland. But it is greatly to be feared that Vaughan, despite all the abstract reasoning which arrays itself against so babyish and barbarous a thing as a battle, would have swung himself into a saddle as readily as any, had not “God’s finger touched him.” A comparison of dates will show that he was bedridden, while his hot heart was afield with the shouting gentlemen whom Mr. Browning heard in a vision:

“King Charles! and who’ll do him right, now?King Charles! and who’s ripe for fight, now?Give a rouse: here’s in Hell’s despite now,King Charles!”

This is the secret of Vaughan’s blood-guiltlessness. Of course he thanked Heaven, after, that he was kept clean of carnage; he would have thanked Heaven for anything that happened to him. It was providential that we of posterity lost a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a poet. As the great confusion cleared, his spirit cleared too, and the Vaughan we know,

“Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair,”

comes in, like a protesting angel, with the Commonwealth. Perhaps he lived long enough to sum up the vanity of statecraft and the instability of public choice, driven from tyranny to license, from absolute monarchy to absolute anarchy; and to turn once more to his “loud brook’s incessant fall” as an object much worthier of a rational man’s regard. Born while James I. was vain-gloriously reigning, Henry Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the orgies of the Restoration (which he did not fail to satirize), and the Revolution of “Meenie the daughter,” as the old Scots song slyly calls her. He had seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out again, and his seventy-four years, on-lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to sit through the dull Georgian farce which began almost as soon as his grave was green.

Moreover, he was thoroughly out of touch with his surroundings. While all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoyinghim up and sweeping him away. He might well have said, like Dr. Henry More, his twin’s rival and challenger in metaphysics, that he was “most of his time mad with pleasure.” While

“every burgess footsThe mortal pavement in eternal boots,”

Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, like a shepherd swain, pondering upon the brood of “green-heads” who denied miracles to have been or to be, and wishing the noisy passengers on the highways of life could be taught the value of

“A sweet self-privacy in a right soul.”

His mind turned to paradoxes and inverted meanings, and the analysis of his own tenacious dreams, in an England of pikes and bludgeons and hock-carts and wassail-cakes. “A proud, humoursome person,” Anthony à Wood called him. He was something of a fatalist, inasmuch as he followed his lonely and straight path, away from crowds, and felt eager for nothing but what fell into his open hands. He strove little, being convincedthat temporal advantage is too often an eternal handicap. “Who breaks his glass to take more light,” he reminds us, “makes way for storms unto his rest.” This passive quality belongs to happy men, and Vaughan was a very happy man, thanks to the faith and will which made him so, although he had known calamity, and had failed in much. Throughout his pages one can trace the affecting struggle between things desired and things forborne. It is only a brave philosopher who can afford to pen a stanza intimate as this:

“O Thou who didst deny to meThe world’s adored felicity!Keep still my weak eyes from the shineOf those gay things which are not Thine.”

He had better possessions than glory under his hand in the health and peace of his middle age and in his cheerful home. He was twice married, and must have lost his first wife, nameless to us, but most tenderly mourned, in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year. She seems to have been the mother of five of his six children. Vaughan was rich in friends. He hadknown Davenant and Cartwright, but it is quite characteristic of him that the two great authors to whom he was especially attached were Jonson and John Fletcher, both only a memory at the time of his first going to London. Of Randolph, Jonson’s strong “son,” who so beggared English literature by dying young in 1634, Vaughan sweetly says somewhere that he will hereafter

“Look for Randolph in those holy meads.”

Mention of his actual fellow-workers is very infrequent, nor does he mention the Shakespeare who had “dwelt on earth unguessed at,” and who is believed to have visited the estates of the Vaughans at Scethrog, and to have picked up the name of his merry fellow Puck from goblin traditions of the neighborhood. Vaughan followed his leisure and his preference in translating divers works of meditation, biography, and medicine, pleasing himself, like Queen Bess, with naturalizing bits of Boethius, and much from Plutarch, Ausonius, Severinus, and Claudian. He did some passages fromOvid, but he must have felt sharply the violence done to the lyric essence in passing it ever so gently from language to language, for he lingered over Adrian’s darlingAnimula vagula blandula, only to leave it alone, and to write of it as the saddest poetry that ever he met with.

Not the least of Henry Vaughan’s blessings was his warm friendship with “the matchless Orinda.”[25]This delightful Catherine Fowler married, in 1647, a stanch royalist, Mr. James Philips of Cardigan Priory, and as his bride, became what, in the Welsh solitudes, was considered “neighbor” to Vaughan, her home being distant from his just fifty miles as the crow flies. She had been, in her infancy, a prodigy of Biblical quotation, like Evelyn’s little Richard, and grew up to be such anotherprécieuseas Madame la Comtesse de Lafayette,néeLavergne; but we know that she was the cleverest and comeliest of good women, and Vaughan’s association with her must have been a perpetual sunshine to him and his. She prefixed, after the fashion of the day, some commendatory verses to his published work. They are not only pretty, but they furnish a bit of adequate criticism. The secular Muse of the Silurist is, according to Orinda,

“Truth clothed in wit, and Love in innocence,”

and has, for her birthright, seriousness and a “charming rigour.” The last two words might stand for him in the fast-coming day when nobody will have time to discuss old poets in anything but technical terms and epigrams. Orinda, with her accurate judgment, should have had a chance to talk to Mr. Thomas Campbell, who adorned hisSpecimenswith the one official and truly prepositional phrase that “Vaughan was one of the harshest of writers, even of the inferior order of the school of conceit!”[26]

While Henry Vaughan was preparing for publication the first half ofSilex Scintillansas the token of his arrested and uplifted youth, Rev. Mr. Thomas Vaughan, backed by a few other sanguine Oxonians, and disregardful of his twin’s exaggerated remorse for the fruits of his profaner years, brought out the “formerly written and newly named”Olor Iscanus, over the author’s head, in 1650, and gave to it a motto from the Georgics. The preface is in Eugenius Philalethes’ own gallant style, and offers a haughty commendation to “beauty from the light retired.” Perhaps Vaughan’s earliest and most partial editor felt, like Thoreau on a certain occasion, that it were well to make an extreme statement, if only so he might make an emphatic one. He chose to supplicate the public of the Protectorate in this wise: “It was the glorious Maro that referred his legacies to the fire, and though princes are seldom executors, yet there came a Cæsar to his testament, as if the act of a poetcould not be repealed but by a king. I am not, reader, Augustus Vindex: here is no royal rescue, but here is a Muse that deserves it. The author had long ago condemned these poems to obscurity and the consumption of that further fate which attends it. This censure gave them a gust of death, and they have partly known that oblivion which our best labors must come to at last. I present thee, then, not only with a book, but with a prey, and, in this kind, the first recoveries from corruption. Here is a flame hath been some time extinguished, thoughts that have been lost and forgot, but now they break out again like the Platonic reminiscency. I have not the author’s approbation to the fact, but I have law on my side, though never a sword: I hold it no man’s prerogative to fire his own house. Thou seest how saucy I am grown, and if thou dost expect I should commend what is published, I must tell thee I cry no Seville oranges; I will not say ‘Here is fine,’ or ‘cheap’: that were an injury to the verse itself, and to the effect it can produce. Readon; and thou wilt find thy spirit engaged, not by the deserts of what we call tolerable, but by the commands of a pen that is above it.” All this is uncritical, but useful and proper on the part of the clerical brother, who writes very much as Lord Edward Herbert might be supposed to write for George under like conditions; for he knew, according to an ancient adage, that there is great folly in pointing out the shortcomings of a work of art to eyes uneducated to its beauties. It was just as well to insist disproportionately upon the principle at stake, that Henry Vaughan’s least book was unique and precious. He was not, like the majority of the happy lyrists of his time, a writer by accident; he was strictly a man of letters, and his sign-manual is large and plain upon everything which bears his name. He indites like a Roman, with evenness and without a superfluous syllable. One cannot italicize him; every word is a congested force, packed to bursting with meaning and insistence; the utterance of a man who has been thinking all his life upon his own chosensubjects, and who unerringly despatches a language about its business, as if he had just created it. Like Andrew Marvell’s excellent father, “he never broached what he had never brewed.” It follows that his work, to which second editions were wellnigh unknown, shows scarcely any variation from itself. It carries with it a testimony that, such as it stands, it is the very best its author can do. Its faults are not slips; they are quite as radical and congenital as its virtues. Vaughan (to transfer a fine phrase of Mr. W. T. Arnold) is “enamoured of perfection,” but he is fully so before he makes up his mind to write, and from the first every stroke of his pen is fatal. It transfixes a noun or a verb, pins it to the page, and challenges a reformer to move or replace it. His modest Muse is as sure as Shakespeare, as nice as Pope; she is incapable of scruples and apprehensions, once she has spoken. What Vaughan says of Cartwright may well be applied to his own deliberate grace of diction:

“Thou thy thoughts hast drest in such a strainAs doth not only speak, but rule and reign.”

“Thou thy thoughts hast drest in such a strain

As doth not only speak, but rule and reign.”

His verses have the tone of a Vandyck portrait, with all its firm pensive elegance and lack of shadow.

Vaughan has very little quaintness, as we now understand that word, and none of the cloudiness and incorrigible grotesqueness which dominated his Alexandrian day. He has great temperance; he keeps his eye upon the end, and scarcely falls at all into “the fond adulteries of art,” inversions, unscholarly compound words, or hard-driven metaphors. If he be difficult to follow, it is only because he lives, as it were, in highly oxygenated air; he is remote and peculiar, but not eccentric. His conceits are not monstrous; the worst of them proclaims:

“Some love a roseIn hand, some in the skin;But, cross to those,I would have mine within”;

“Some love a rose

In hand, some in the skin;

But, cross to those,

I would have mine within”;

which will bear a comparison with Carew’s hatched cherubim, or with that very provincialism of Herbert’s which describes a rainbow as the lace of Peace’s coat! Those of Vaughan’s figures not drawn from the open air, where he washappiest, are, indeed, too bold and too many, and they come from strange corners: from finance, medicine, mills, the nursery, and the mechanism of watches and clocks. In no one instance, however, does he start wrong, like the great influencer, Donne, inThe Valediction, and finish by turning such impediments as “stiff twin-compasses” into images of memorable beauty. TheEncyclopædia Britannica, like Campbell, finds Vaughan “untunable,” and so he is very often. But poets may not always succeed in metaphysics and in music too. The lute which has the clearest and most enticing twang under the laurel boughs is Herrick’s, and not Donne’s; Mr. Swinburne’s, and not Mr. Browning’s. It is to be observed that when Vaughan lets go of his regrets, his advice, and his growls over the bad times, he falls into instant melody, as if in that, and not in a rough impressiveness, were his real strength. His blessing for the river Usk flows sweetly as the tide it hangs upon:

“Garlands, and songs, and roundelays,And dewy nights, and sunshine days,The turtle’s voice, joy without fear,Dwell on thy bosom all the year!To thee the wind from far shall bringThe odors of the scattered spring,And, loaden with the rich arrear,Spend it in spicy whispers here.”

Vaughan played habitually with his pauses, and unconsciously threw the metrical stress on syllables and words least able to bear it; but no sensitive ear can be otherwise than pleased at the broken sequence of such lines as

“these birds of light make a land gladChirping their solemn matins on a tree,”

“these birds of light make a land glad

Chirping their solemn matins on a tree,”

and the hesitant symbolism of

“As if his liquid loose retinue stayedLingering, and were of this steep place afraid.”

“As if his liquid loose retinue stayed

Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid.”

The word “perspective,” with the accent upon the first syllable, was a favorite with him; and Wordsworth approved of that usage enough to employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King’s College Chapel.[27]In short, if Vaughanbe “untunable,” it is because he never learned to distil vowels at the expense or peril of the message which he believed himself bound to deliver, even where hearers were next to none, and which he tried only to make compact and clear. His speech has a deep and free harmony of its own, to those whom abruptness does not repel; and even critics who turn from him to the masters of verbal sound may do him the parting honor of acknowledging the nature of his limitation.

“A noble error, and but seldom made,When poets are by too much force betrayed!”

Vaughan was a born observer, and in his poetry may be found the pioneer expression of the nineteenth-century feeling for landscape. His canvas is not often large; he had an indifference towards the exquisite presence of autumn, and an inland ignorance of the sea. But hecould portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines:

“It was high spring, and all the wayPrimrosed, and hung with shade,”

“It was high spring, and all the way

Primrosed, and hung with shade,”

which etches for you the whole winding lane, roofed and floored with beauty; he carries a reader over half a continent in his

“Paths that are hidden from the vulture’s eyes,”

and suspends him above man’s planet altogether with his audacious eagle, to whom “whole seas are narrow spectacles,” and who

“in the clear height and upmost airDoth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!”

Besides this large vision, Vaughan had uncommon knowledge how to employ detail, during the prolonged literary interval when it was wholly out of fashion. It has been the lot of the little rhymesters of all periods to deal with the open air in a general way, and to embellish their pages with birds and boughs; but it takes a true modern poet, under the influenceof the Romantic revival, to sum up perfectly the ravages of wind and frost:

“Where is the pride of summer, the green prime,The many, many leaves all twinkling?—ThreeOn the mossed elm; three on the naked limeTrembling; and one upon the old oak tree”;

“Where is the pride of summer, the green prime,

The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three

On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime

Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree”;

and it takes another to give the only faithful and ideal report of a warbling which every schoolboy of the race had heard before him:

“That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,Lest you should think he never could recaptureThe first fine careless rapture.”

“That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture.”

That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification is remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze is upon the inaccessible ether, but he seems to detect everything between himself and heaven. He sighs over the inattentive rustic, whom, perhaps, he catches scowling by the pasture-bars of the wild Welsh downs:

“O that he would hearThe world read to him!”

“O that he would hear

The world read to him!”

Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself hears and sees; and his interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, straight from life. He has the inevitable phrase for every phenomenon, a little low-comedy phrase, sometimes, such as Shakespeare and Carew had used before him:

“Deep snowCandies our country’s woody brow.”

“Deep snow

Candies our country’s woody brow.”

It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Vaughan to love, or serve, art and nature for themselves. His cue was to walk abroad circumspectly and with incessant reverence, because in all things he found God. He marks, at every few rods in the thickets, “those low violets of Thine,” and the “breathing sacrifice” of earth-odors which the “parched and thirsty isle” gratefully sends back after a shower.[28]His prayeris that he may not forget that physical beauty is a great symbol, but only a symbol; a “hid ascent” through “masks and shadows” to the divine; or, as Mr. Lowell said in one of his last poems,

“a tentPitched for an Inmate far more excellent.”

“a tent

Pitched for an Inmate far more excellent.”

A humanist of the school of Assisi, Vaughan was full of out-of-door meeknesses and pieties, nowhere sweeter in their expression than in this all-embracing valedictory:

“O knowing, glorious Spirit! whenThou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,*****Give him among Thy works a placeWho in them loved and sought Thy face.”

“O knowing, glorious Spirit! when

Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,

*****

Give him among Thy works a place

Who in them loved and sought Thy face.”

He muses in the garden, at evenfall:

“Man is such a marigoldAs shuts, and hangs the head.”

“Man is such a marigold

As shuts, and hangs the head.”

Clouds, seasons, and the eternal stars are his playfellows; he apostrophizes our sister the rainbow, and reminds her of yesterday, when

“Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,The youthful world’s grey fathers, in one knot,”

“Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,

The youthful world’s grey fathers, in one knot,”

lifted anxious looks to her new splendor. He is familiar with the depression which comes from boding weather, when

“a pilgrim’s eye,Far from relief,Measures the melancholy sky.”

“a pilgrim’s eye,

Far from relief,

Measures the melancholy sky.”

He has an artist’s feeling, also, for the wrath of the elements, which inevitably hurry him on to the consummation

“When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred storeOf thunders in that heat,And low as e’er they lay beforeThy six-days buildings beat!”

“When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred store

Of thunders in that heat,

And low as e’er they lay before

Thy six-days buildings beat!”

“I saw,” he says, suddenly—

“I saw Eternity the other night”;

and he is perpetually seeing things almost as startling and as bright: the “edges and the bordering light” of lost infancy; the processional grandeur of old books, which he fearlessly calls

“The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way”;

and visions of the Judgment, when

“from the rightThe white sheep pass into a whiter light.”

“from the right

The white sheep pass into a whiter light.”

Here the figure beautifully forecasts a famous one of Rossetti’s. Light, indeed, is Vaughan’s distinctive word, and the favorite source of his similes and illustrations.

If Vaughan’s had not been so profoundly moral a nature, he would have lacked his picturesque sense of the general, the continuous. That shibboleth, “a primrose by the river’s brim,” is to him all the generations of all the yellow primroses smiling there since the Druids’ day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects the hope and fear and pathos of the mortal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted it, age after age. Whatever he meets upon his walk is drowned and dimmed in a wide halo of association and sympathy. His unmistakable accent marks the opening of a little sermon calledThe Timber;a sigh of pity, tender as a child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs:

“Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springsMany bright mornings, much dew, many showers,Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29]

“Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springs

Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,

Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,

Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29]

Leigh Hunt once challenged England and America[30]to produce anything approaching, for music and feeling, the beauty of

“boughs that shake against the cold,Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

“boughs that shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

He forgot the closes of these artless lines of a minor poet; or he did not know them.

Vaughan’s meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four critics eminently fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime; but, curiously enough, none of these, not even the best of them, the same Charles Lamb who said a just and generous word for Wither, had the satisfaction of rescuing his sunken name. Lamb’s friend, the good soul Bernard Barton, seems, however, to have known and admired his Vaughan.

Eight little books, if we count the two parts ofSilex Scintillansas one,[31]enclose all of the Silurist’s original work. He began to publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, reappearing but in 1678 withThalia Rediviva, which wasnot issued under his own supervision. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten up to the date (1847) of the faulty but timely Aldine edition of the Rev. H. F. Lyte, thrice reprinted and revised since then, and until the appearance of Dr. Grosart’s four inestimable quartos; but Mr. Carew Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. As the results of Dr. Grosart’s patient service to our elder writers are necessarily semi-private, it may be said with truth that the real Vaughan is still debarred from the general reader, who is, indeed, the identical person least concerned about that state of affairs. His name is not irrecoverable nor unfamiliar to scholars.[32]His mind, on the whole, might pass for the product of yesterday; and he, who needs no glossary, may handsomely cede the honors of one to Mr. William Morris. It is at least certain that had Vaughan lately lifted up his sylvan voice out ofBrecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modelled himself unduly upon George Herbert.[33]He has gone into eclipse behind that gracious name.

Henry Vaughan was a child of thirteen when Herbert, a stranger to him, died at Bemerton, and he read him first in the sick-chamber to which the five years’ distresses of his early manhood confined him. The reading could not have been prior to 1647, forOlor Iscanus, Vaughan’s second volume, was lying ready for the press that year, as we know from the date of its dedication to Lord Kildare Digby. As no novice poet, therefore, he fell under the spell of a sweet and elect soul, who was also a lover of vanquished royalty, a convert who had looked upon the vanities of the court and the city, a Welshman born, and not unconnectedwith Vaughan’s own ancient and patrician house. These were slight coincidences, but they served to strengthen a forming tie. The Silurist somewhere thanks Herbert’s “holy ever-living lines” for checking his blood; and it was, perhaps, the only service rendered of which he was conscious. But his endless iambics and his vague allegorical titles are cast thoroughly in the manner of Herbert, and he takes from the same source the heaped categorical epithets, the didactic tone, and the introspectiveness which are his most obvious failings. Vaughan’s intellectual debt to Herbert resolves itself into somewhat less than nothing; for in following him with zeal to the Missionary College of the Muses, he lost rather than gained, and he is altogether delightful and persuasive only where he is altogether himself. Nevertheless, a certain spirit of conformity and filial piety towards Herbert has betrayed Vaughan into frequent and flagrant imitations. It seems as if these must have been voluntary, and rooted in an intention to enforce the same truths in all butthe same words; for the moment Vaughan breaks into invective, or comes upon his distinctive topics, such as childhood, natural beauty (for which Herbert had an imperfect sense), friendship, early death, spiritual expectation, he is off and away, free of any predecessor, thrilling and unforgettable. Comparisons will not be out of place here, for Vaughan can bear, and even invoke them. Dryden said in Jonson’s praise that he was “a learned plagiary,” and nobody doubts nowadays that Shakespeare and Milton were the bandit kings of their time. There was, indeed, in English letters, up to Queen Anne’s reign, an open communism of ideas and idioms astonishing to look upon; there is less confiscation at present, because, outside the pale of the sciences, there is less thinking. If any one thing can be closer to another, for instance, than even Drummond’s sonnet onSleepis to Sidney’s, it is the dress of Vaughan’s morality to that of George Herbert’s. Mr. Simcox is the only critic who has taken the trouble to contrast them, and he does so in so random a fashion as to suggest that his scrutiny,in some cases, has been confined to the rival titles. It is certain that no other mind, however bent upon identifications, can find a likeness betweenThe QuipandThe Queer, or betweenThe TempestandProvidence. Vaughan’sMutiny, likeThe Collar, ends in a use of the word “child,” after a scene of strife; and if ever it were meant to match Herbert’s poem, distinctly falls behind it, and deals, besides, with a much weaker rebelliousness.Rules and Lessonsis so unmistakably modelled uponThe Church Porchthat it scarcely calls for comment. Herbert’s admonitions, however, are continued, but nowhere repeated; and Vaughan’s succeed in being poetic, which the others are not. Beyond these replicas, Vaughan’s structural genius is in no wise beholden to Herbert’s. But numerous phrases and turns of thought descend from the master to the disciple, undergoing such subtle and peculiar changes, and given back, as Coleridge would say, with such “usurious interest,” that it may well be submitted whether, in this casual list, every borrowing, save two, be not a bettering.

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