1621-1695
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-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;[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, 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, 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 suffered most
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 in _Olor Iscanus_, to regret or cancel.
Every unbaptized song is “bright only in its own innocence, 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,”
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 more fortunate 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. He makes 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 springs
And source of things,
Shall, with inlighted rays,
Pierce all their ways!”
With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:
“Who circled in
Corruption 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 physician must 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 good
After sun-rising; far-day sullies flowers.”
He was hospitable on a limited income.[23] 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 and Horatian 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
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 gusto _The Old Man of Verona_, out
of Claudian, and Guevara’s _Happiness of Country Life_; and he notes
with satisfaction 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 his _Mount 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 must have 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 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,
“O accept
Of his vowed heart, whom Thou hast kept
From 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 tells
us 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, 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
“every burgess foots
The 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
convinced that 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 me
The world’s adored felicity!
Keep still my weak eyes from the shine
Of 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
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. 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 from Ovid, 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 darling _Animula
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 another
_précieuse_ as Madame la Comtesse de Lafayette, _née_ Lavergne; 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 his _Specimens_ with 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 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 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 poet could 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. Read on; 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 chosen subjects, 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 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 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 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 _Encyclopædia
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 bring
The 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 glad
Chirping their solemn matins on a tree,”
and the hesitant symbolism of
“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 Vaughan be “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 he could
portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines:
“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 air
Doth 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
influence of 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?—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 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 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 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 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,
“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! 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 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,”
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.”
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 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 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 called _The Timber_; a sigh of pity, tender as a
child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs:
“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.”
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 of _Silex Scintillans_
as 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 with _Thalia Rediviva_, which was not 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 of
Brecknockshire, 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, 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, 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 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
modelled upon _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,
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.