“A silent tear can pierce Thy throne
When loud joys want a wing;
And sweeter airs stream from a groan
Than any artèd string.”
“Follow the cry no more! There is
An ancient way,
All strewed with flowers and happiness,
And fresh as May!”
“feverish souls
Sick with a scarf or glove.”
“I’ll get me up before the sun,
I’ll cull me boughs off many a tree;
And all alone full early run
To gather flowers and welcome Thee.”
“Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass;
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
Where I shall need no glass!”
“Thy grave, to which my thoughts shall move
Like bees in storms unto their hive.”
To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal assizes of
literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses
it. Herbert’s odd and fresh metaphors, his homing bees and pricks of
conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and the 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, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s
word, to the “centre.” Vaughan’s mind, despite its mysticism, was full
of despatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself, more
than once, as “fierce”; and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him.
There is in Vaughan, at his height, an imaginative 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. Ruskin 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
“O that I once past changing were
Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!”
or the tranquil confession of faith:
“Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy hands made both, and I am there:
Thy power and love, my love and trust
Make one place everywhere!”
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. Herbert has had his reward in the world’s lasting appreciation;
and though 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. Or re-risen, he would cry
loyally to him, as to that other Herbert, the rector of Llangattock and
his old tutor: “_Pars vertat patri, vita posthuma tibi_.”
Vaughan, then, owed 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.