“familiarly confer
Beneath the oak and juniper,”
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 long after to the manuscripts of the Puritan stripling,
close-kept at Cambridge and Horton; but it is interesting to find the
prototype of Vaughan’s charming lines about Rachel,
“the sheep-keeping Syrian maid,”
in the _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, dating from
1631.[34] Vaughan’s dramatic Fleet Street,
“Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way,”
might as well be Swift’s, or Crabbe’s; and his salutation to the lark,
“And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light,
Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing,”
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
“If I were dead, and in my place,”
addressed to Amoret,[35] in the _Poems_ of 1646. The delicate simile,
“As some blind dial, when the day is done,
Can tell us at midnight there was a sun,”
and
“But I am sadly loose and stray,
A giddy blast each way.
O let me not thus range:
Thou canst not change!”
(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the
eighth chapter to the 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_. It is Holinshed’s
accidental honor that he is lost in Shakespeare, and incorporated
with him. So with Vaughan: if shorn of his dues, he still remains
illustrious by virtue of one signal service to Wordsworth, whom, in the
main, he distinctly foreshadows. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be
jealous that the “first sprightly runnings” of a classic should not be
better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly
adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes. In the broad
range of English letters we find two persons whose normal mental habits
seem altogether of a piece with Vaughan’s: a woman of the eighteenth
century, and a philosopher of the nineteenth. The lovely _Petition for
an Absolute Retreat_, by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (whose genius
was the charming _trouvaille_ of Mr. Edmund Gosse), might pass for
Vaughan’s, in Vaughan’s best manner; and so might
“Their near camp my spirit knows
By signs gracious as rainbows,”
as indeed the whole of Emerson’s ever-memorable _Forerunners_, itself a
mate for _The Retreat_; or rather, had these been anonymous lyrics of
Vaughan’s own day, it would have been impossible to persuade a Caroline
critic that he could not name their common author.
Our poet had a curious fashion of coining verbs and adjectives out of
nouns, and carried it to such a degree as to challenge pre-eminence
with Keats.
“O how it bloods
And spirits all my earth!”
is part and parcel of the young cries of Endymion. When Vaughan has
discovered something to produce a fresh effect, he is not the man who
will hesitate to use it; and this mannerism occurs frequently: “our
grass straight russets,” “angel’d from that sphere,” “the mountained
wave,” “He heavened their walks, and with his eyes made those wild
shades a Paradise.” A little informality of this sort sometimes
justifies itself, as in the couplet ending the grim and powerful
_Charnel-House_:
“But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain,
One check from thee shall channel it again!”
And Henry Vaughan shares also with Keats, writing three hundred
years later, a defect which he had inherited, together with many
graces, directly from Ben Jonson:[36] the fashion of crowding the
sense of his text and the pauseless voice of his reader from the
natural breathing-place at the end of a line into the beginning or
the middle of the next line. More than any other, except Keats in his
first period, he roughens, without always strengthening, his rich
decasyllabics, by using what Mr. Gosse has happily classified as the
“overflow.”
Though the Silurist had in him the possibilities of a great elegiac
poet, and his laments for his dead are many and memorable, there is not
one sustained masterpiece among them; nothing to equal or approach,
for example, Cowley’s _Ode on the Death of Mr. William Hervey_, in
the qualities which abide, and are visited with the honors of the
class-book and the library shelf. Yet Vaughan’s elegies are 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 wings were grief and love.”
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:
“O could I track them! but souls must
Track one the other;
And now the spirit, not the dust,
Must be thy brother:
Yet I have one pearl by whose light
All things I see,
And in the heart of death and night,
Find Heaven and thee.”
_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 gloom, in
“Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day,”
can be compared to nothing but an _agitato_ of Schubert’s 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_, _Joy of my Life while
Left me Here_, _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 forever from
temporal pursuits and pleasures. Of his first wife we can find none but
conjectural traces in his books, for he was shy of using the beloved
name. The sense of those departed is never far from him. The air of
melancholy recollection, not morbid, which hangs over his maturer
lyrics, is directly referable to the close-following calamities which
estranged him from the presence of “the blessèd few,” and sent him, as
he nobly hoped,
“Home from their dust to empty his own glass.”
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:
“A nest of nights; a gloomy sphere
Where shadows thicken, and the cloud
Sits on the sun’s brow all the year,
And nothing moves without a shroud.”
This is masterly; but here, again, there is reserve, the curbing hand
of a man who holds, with Plato, a wilful 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.” As his corporeal sight is always
upon the zenith or the horizon, so his fancy is far away, with his
radiant ideals, and with the virtue and beauty he has walked with in
the flesh. He takes his harp to the topmost hill, and sits watching
“till the white-winged reapers come.”
He thinks of his obscured self, the child he was, and of “the narrow
way” (an ever-recurrent Scriptural phrase in his poetry) by which he
shall “travel back.” To leave the body is merely to start anew and
recover strength, and, with it, the inspiring companionship of which he
is inscrutably deprived.
Chambers’ _Cyclopædia_ 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
impossible 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
“are indeed our pillar-fires
Seen as we go;
They are the city’s shining spires
We travel to.”
Who can resist the earnestness and candor with which, in a few
sessions, he wrote down the white passion of the last fifty years
of his life? No English poet, unless it be Spenser, has a piety so
simple and manly, so colored with mild thought, so free from emotional
consciousness. The elect given over to continual polemics do not count
Henry Vaughan as one of themselves. His double purpose is to make life
pleasant to others and to praise God; and he considers that he is
accomplishing it when he pens a compliment to the valley grass, or,
like Coleridge, caresses in some affectionate strophes the much-abused
little ass. 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 of
moss and rocks, 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 church-yard with trees, where the
west is dying, in hues of lilac and rose, behind the low ivied Norman
tower. The south windows are open, the young choir are within, and the
organist, with many a hushed unconventional interlude of his own, is
rehearsing with them the psalm of “pleasures for evermore.”