"Happy those early dayes, when I
Shin'd in my Angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, Celestiall thought;
When yet I had not walkt above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some gilded Cloud or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My Conscience with a sinfule sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence,
But felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
O how I long to travell back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine,
Where first I left my glorious traine;
From whence th' Inlightned spirit sees
That shady City of Palme trees."
To use the words of Lord Jeffrey as applied to Shakspeare, Vaughan seems
to have had in large measure and of finest quality, "that indestructible
love of flowers, and odors, and dews, and clear waters, and soft airs
and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight,
which are the material elements of poetry; and that fine sense of their
undefinable relation to mental emotion which is its essence and its
vivifying power."
And though what Sir Walter says of the country surgeon is too true, that
he is worse fed and harder wrought than any one else in the parish,
except it be his horse; still, to a man like Vaughan, to whom the love
of nature and its scrutiny was a constant passion, few occupations could
have furnished ampler and more exquisite manifestations of her
magnificence and beauty. Many of his finest descriptions give us quite
the notion of their having been composed when going his rounds on his
Welsh pony among the glens and hills, and their unspeakable solitudes.
Such lines as the following to a Star were probably direct from nature
on some cloudless night:--
"Whatever 'tis, whose beauty here below
Attracts thee thus, and makes thee stream and flow,
And winde and curle, and wink and smile,
Shifting thy gate and guile."
He is one of the earliest of our poets who treats external nature
subjectively rather than objectively, in which he was followed by Gray
(especially in his letters) and Collins and Cowper, and in some measure
by Warton, until it reached its consummation, and perhaps its excess, in
Wordsworth.
We shall now give our readers some specimens from the reprint of the
_Silex_ by Mr. Pickering, so admirably edited by the Rev. H. F. Lyte,
himself a true poet, of whose careful life of our author we have made
very free use.