Henry Vaughan the Silurist

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, he styled himself the Silurist upon his title-pages ; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of epitaphs, close by his lifelong 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-Fan and 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 ; 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 Llansaintfread ; 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, his Isca parens florum, to which 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 Scott, 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 aesthetic 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 apart 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. Some time between 1645 and 1653 he was seized by a sorely protracted and nearly fatal illness; and during its progress 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

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 wonders what he found in his first tiny volume of 1646 or in Olor Iscanus to regret or cancel. 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. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions, Vaughan’s voice grew at once free 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.

He was, in the only liberal sense, a learned man, full of lifelong curiosity for the fruit of the Eden Tree, His lines beginning,

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. He makes the soul sing joyously to the body :

His occupation as a resident physician must have fostered his fine eye and ear for the green earth, and furnished him, day by day, with musiugs 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 whoever would listen, that He was hospitable on a limited income. His verses of invitation To 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 song of content: that he has enough lands and 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 hards! 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.” A literary acquaintance, one unrecognized N. W ., congratulates Vaughan that he is able to “ give his Muse the swing in an hereditary shade.” He was an angler, need it be added ? Nay, the autocrat of anglers, — he was a salmon-catcher.

The poets who did not fight for the king were commonly supposed to redeem their reputation by dying of grief, like Drummond of Hawthornden, at his overthrow. 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 guesses, 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 (an alchemist, an Orientalist, and a Rosicrueian, 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) had been a recruit, and a brave one. But Henry Vaughan ex. plicitly tells us, in his Ad Posteros, and in a prayer in the second part of Silex Scintillans, that he had no personal share in the constitutional struggle, that he shed no blood. Again, he cries, in a third lyric, —

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 be counted in with his known moral courage and right sentiment; and one’s fancy is ready to fasten on Vaughan’s sad neutrality the passionate “ingemination” for “peace, peace,” which “took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart,” such as Clarendon tells us of in his ever-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 against the existing government 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 : —

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,

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 vaingloriously 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 times. While all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying him 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

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

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. All through 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 : —

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 had known 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.

While Henry Vaughan was preparing for publication the first half of Silex Scintillans, as 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 Engenius 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. The clerical brother 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 uponeverything 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 chosen subjects, and who unerringly dispatches 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 well-nigh 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 “ enamored 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 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. Those of Vaughan’s figures not drawn from the open air, where he was happiest, 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, in The Valediction, and finish by turning such impediments as “ stiff twin-compasses ” into images of memorable beauty. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, like Campbell, finds Vaughan “ untunable,” and so he is very often. But poets who crowd their lines with thought do 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:

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

and

The word “ perspective,” which he introduced with the accent upon the first syllable, was a favorite with him; and Wordsworth thought well enough of that usage to employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King’s College Chapel.

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 he could portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines,

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

and suspends him above man’s planet altogether with his audacious eagle, which

That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification of natural objects is remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze is upon the remote 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 : —

Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself sees and hears : 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 Carew had used before him : —

It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Henry 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. His prayer is 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,

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

“ I saw,” he says suddenly,

and he is forever 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

and visions of the Judgment, when

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

Vaughan’s meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four critics perfectly 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. Eight little books inclose all of the Silurist’s work. He began to publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, breaking his after-silence but twice, — with Thalia Rediviva in 1678, and a translation of Nieremberg’s Meditations in 1682. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten up to the date, 1847, of the faulty edition of the Rev. H. F. Lyte, and until the appearance of Dr. Grosart’s inestimable quartos ; but Mr. Carew Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an eighteenth-century Vaughan reprint. As the results of Dr. Grosart’s patient service to our elder choir 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. 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 unique and sylvan voice out of Brecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modeled himself unduly upon George Herbert. 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, for Olor 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 unconnected with 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 but the 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, as his thrilling and unforgettable self. 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 than even Drummond’s sonnet on Sleep is 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 between The Quip and The Queer, or between The Tempest and Providence. Vaughan’s Mutiny, like The 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 Lessons is so unmistakably modeled upon

HERBERT.

The Church Porch that 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 that it may well be submitted whether, in this casual list, every borrowing, save two, be not a bettering.

VAUGHAN.

To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal courts of literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses it. Herbert’s odd and fresh metaphors, his homingbees and pricks of conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and his comrade bird, even his famous female scarf, go over bodily to the spoiler. In many an instance something involved and difficult still characterizes Herbert’s diction ; and it is diverting to watch how the interfering hand sorts and settles it at one touch, and sends it, as Mr. Arnold would say, to the “ centre.” Vaughan’s mind, despite its mysticism, was full of dispatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself more than once as “ fierce ; ” and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him. There was in Vaughan, at his height, a rush and fire which Herbert never knew, a greater clarity and conciseness, a far greater restraint, a keener sense both of color and form, and so much more deference for what Mr. Raskin calls “ the peerage of words ” that the younger man could never have been content to send forth a line which might mean its opposite, such as occurs in the fine stanza about

glory in the beautiful Quip. It is only on middle ground that the better poet and the better saint collide. Vaughan never could have written, —

or the tranquil confession of faith, —

For his best is not Herbert’s best, nor his worst Herbert’s worst. It is not Vaughan who reminds us that “ filth ” lies under a fair face. He does the “ fiercer ’ thing: he goes to the pit’s mouth in a trance, and “ hears them yell. Herbert’s noblest and most winning art still has its stand upon the altar steps of The Temple ; but Vaughan is always on the roof, under the stars, like a somnambulist, or actually above and out of sight, “ pinnacled dim in the intense inane ; ” absorbed in larger and wilder things, and stretching the spirits of all who try to follow him. The homelier and more restful writer has had his reward in the world’s lasting appreciation ; and although Vaughan had a favorable opinion of his own staying powers, nothing would have grieved him less than to step aside, if the choice had lain between him and his exemplar.

Vaughan, then, owes something to Herbert, although it was by no means the best which Herbert could give ; but he himself is, what Herbert is not, an ancestor. He leans forward to touch Cowper and Keble ; and Mr. Churton Collins has taken the pains to trace him in Tennyson.

The angels who

invoke an instant thought of the Milton of the Allegro ; and the fragrant winds which linger by Usk, “loaden with the rich arrear,” appear to be Milton’s, too. His austere music first sounded in the public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, much his junior, began to print. It would seem very unlikely that a Welsh physician should be beholden to the close-kept manuscripts of the Puritan stripling at Cambridge and Horton ; but it is interesting to find the prototype of Vaughan’s charming lines about Rachel, the wife of Jacob.

in the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, dating from 1631. Vaughan’s dramatic Fleet Street,

might as well he Swift’s ; and his salutation to the lark,

is like a quotation from some tender sonnet of Bowles, or from his admirer, the young Coleridge who instantly outstepped him. Olor, Silex, and Thalia establish unexpected relationships with genius the most remote from them and from each other. The animated melody of poor Rochester’s best songs seems deflected from

addressed to Amoret, in the Poems of 1646. The delicate simile,

and

(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the eighth chapter of Romans), come home with a smile to the lover of Clough. Vaughan was that dangerous person, an original thinker ; and the consequence is that he compromises a great many authors who may never have heard of him. It is admitted now that we owe to his prophetic lyre one of the boasts of modern literature. Dr. Grosart has handled so well the obvious debt of Wordsworth in The Intimations of Immortality, and has proven so conclusively that Vaughan figured in the library at Rydal Mount, that little need be said here on that theme. In Corruption, Childhood, Looking Back, and The Retreat, most markedly in the first, lie the whole point and pathos of

“ Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From Heaven, which is our home.”

Few studies are more fascinating than that of the liquidation, so to speak, of Vaughan’s brief, tense, impassioned monodies into “ the mighty waters rolling evermore ” of the great Ode. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be jealous that the “first sprightly runnings” of an English classic should not be better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes.

Vaughan’s elegies are so exquisite and endearing, they haunt one with the conviction that they stop short of immortality, not because their author had too little skill, but because, between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions, no art could make out to live. He had a deep heart, such as deep hearts will always recognize and reverence : — “ And thy two wing’s were grief and love.” His thoughts jostle him hard at all times; but in the face of eternity he seems so to accord with the event which all but destroys him that sorrow inexpressible becomes suddenly unexpressed, and his funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm and serenity open to no misconception. Distance, and the lapse of time, and his own utter reconciliation to the play of events make small difference in his utterance upon the old topic. The thought of his friend, forty years after, is the same mystical rapture : —

Daphnis, the eclogue to the memory of Thomas Vaughan, is the only one of these elegies which, possessing a surplus of beautiful lines, is not even in the least satisfying. “ R. Hall,” “no woolsack soldier,” who was slain at the siege of Pontefract, won from Henry Vaughan a passionate requiem, which opens with a gush of agony, — "I knew it would be thus ! ” — as affecting as anything in the early ballads ; and the battle of Rowton Heath took from him “ R. W.,” the comrade of his youth. But it was in one who bore his sovereign’s name (hitherto unidentified, although he is said to have been the subject of a “ public sorrow ”) that Vaughan lost the friend upon whom his whole nature seemed to lean. The soldier-heart in himself spoke out firmly in the cry he consecrated To the Pious Memory of C. W. Its masculine dignity ; the pride and soft triumph which it gathers about it, advancing ; the plain heroic ending which sweeps away all images of remoteness and night, in “ Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day,” can be compared to nothing but a concord of mounting strings, slowing to their major chord with a courage and cheer that bring tears to the eyes. Vaughan’s tender threnodies would make a small but precious volume. To the Pious Memory, with Thou that Knowest for Whom I Mourn, Silence and Stealth of Days, I Walked the Other Day to Spend my Hour, The Morning Watch, and Beyond the Veil are alone enough to give him rank forever as a genius and a good man.

“ C. W.’s ” death was one of the things which turned him from temporal pursuits and pleasures,

His thoughts centred henceforward, in their full intensity, on the supernatural world ; nay, if he were irremediably depressed, not only on the persistence of resolved matter, by means of which buried men come forth again in the color of flowers and the fragrance of the wind, but even on the physical damp and dark which confine our mortality. It is the poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air who can pack horror on horror into his nervous quatrains about Death : —

This is masterly; but here again there is reserve, the curbing hand of a man who holds, with Plato, a willful indulgence in the “ realism ” of sadness to be an actual crime. Vaughan’s dead dwell, indeed, as his own mind does, in “ the world of light.”

Chambers’ Encyclopædia made an epic blunder, long ago, when it ascribed to this gentlest of Anglicans a “ gloomy sectarianism.” He, of all religious poets, makes the most charming secular reading, and may well be a favorite with the heathen for whom Herbert is too decorative, Crashaw too hectic and intense, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too fluent, Lyra Apostolica a treatise, though a glorious one, on Things which Must be Revived, and Hymns Ancient and Modern an exceeding weariness to the spirit. It is a saw of Dr. Johnson’s that it is difficult for theology to clothe itself in attractive numbers; but then Dr. Johnson was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in human nature to refuse to cherish the “ holy, happy, healthy Heaven ” which he has left us (in a graded alliteration which smacks of the physician rather than of the “ gloomy sectarian"), his very social “ angels talking to a man,” and his bright saints hovering and smiling nigh, who

All this liberal sweetness and charity heighten Vaughan’s poetic quality, as they deepen the impression of his practical Christianity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. When he talks affectionately of moss and rocks or of dumb animals, it is as if they were incorporated into the ritual. He has the genius of prayer, and may be recognized by “ those graces which walk in a veil and a silence.” He is full of distinction, and of a sort of golden idiosyncrasy. Vaughan’s true “ note ” is —Vaughan. To read him is like coming alone to a village churchyard with trees, where the west is dying in lilac and rose behind the low ivied Norman tower. The young choir is within, the south windows are open, and the organist, with many a hushed, unconventional interlude of his own, is rehearsing the psalm of pleasures for evermore : ” “I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel. . . . I have set the Lord always before me: because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”

Louise Imogen Guiney.