[20] Siluria comprised the shires of Monmouth, Hereford, Glamorgan,
Radnor, and Brecon.
[21] The Reverend H. F. Lyte, Vaughan’s enthusiastic editor, best known
as the author of _Abide with Me_, reminds us that there was another
Henry Vaughan of the same college and the same neighborhood at home—a
pleasant theological person not to be confounded with the poet. It was
probably he, and not the Silurist, who devoted some verses to Charles
the First in the book called _Eucharistica Oxoniensis_, 1641.
[22] These deep Augustinian lines are Carew’s, gay Carew’s; and they
mark the highest religious expression of their time.
[23] Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, acquaintance
with a London garret, if we may take autobiographically the fine brag
worthy of the tribe of Henri Mürger:
“I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the
sacred stars do circle me.”
[24] The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and my Lady Castlemaine
(together, alas!) at Merton, amid endless hawking, tennis, boating,
basset, and general revelry.
[25] Orinda’s own verses, scattered in manuscript among her friends,
were collected and printed without her knowledge, and much against her
desire, in 1663: a piece of treachery which threw her into a severe
indisposition. She could therefore condole more than enough with Henry
Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in those days.
[26] This, to say the least, was not “pretty” of Campbell, who thought
so well of the “world’s grey fathers” congregated to gaze at Vaughan’s
_Rainbow_ that he conveyed them bodily into the foreground of his own.
[27] Per´-spective was, of course, the general pronunciation from
Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with great beauty in Dryden’s
_Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. But it is a characteristic
word with Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth took it.
[28] Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing which makes the
loveliness of the British isles, and which the ungrateful islanders
are prone to revile. He never passes a sheet of water without looking
upward for the forming cloud:
“That drowsy lake From her faint bosom breathed thee!”
[29] Sometimes erroneously printed “bowers.”
[30] It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America in his
enumeration, at a time when the United States were supposed by his
fellow-countrymen to have no literature at all of their own. The
circumstance that his challenge appeared in the preface to _The Book
of the Sonnet_, which was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an
American, and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account for the
mannerliness of the reference.
[31] In the _Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench_, vol. ii.,
p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point from Mr. Frank
Millson, dated 1868, which deserves serious consideration from
Vaughan’s forthcoming editors. “I think,” he writes the Dean, “that
your supposition that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one
of 1650, with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct,
though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering’s reprint, thinks as
you do. The preface to the 1655 edition is dated September 30, 1654,
and contains this passage” (not given in the _Memorials_) “which seems
to me to refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my two
copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a sheet, title
and dedication, and 110 pages. The second edition has title, preface,
dedication, motto, the 110 pages of the first edition, with 84 pages
of new matter, and a table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the
arrangement is that the sheets do not begin with new printer’s marks,
as they might be expected to do if the second part were simply new
matter added to the first volume, but begin with A, the last sheet of
the former volume having ended with G. I am sorry to trouble you with
these trifling details; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite author
of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they help to show that he
was not neglected by readers of his own time, I shall be glad.”
[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John
Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their
pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always.
Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his
_Lives of the Poets_, published in 1687. He is not in the _Theatrum
Poetarum_, nor in Johnson’s _Lives_. He is in neither of Southey’s
collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in _The Golden Treasury_, but
a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent _Specimens_ of 1811
furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the _Best and Most
Accomplished Couple_ apologizing for “their too much quaintness and
conceit”; and in Willmott’s _Sacred Poets_ Vaughan occupies four
pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and
Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr.
George Macdonald’s _England’s Antiphon_, and in Archbishop Trench’s
_Household Book_. Ward’s _English Poets_, in the second volume, has a
conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and
Whipple’s _Family Library of British Poetry_. There is a goodly list
entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s _Less-Known British Poets_,
all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics
again adorn the splendid _Treasury of Sacred Song_. Vaughan’s secular
numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most
of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin
of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, has a
small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave,
having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial
honor in the eleventh volume of _Y Cymmrodor_. In Emerson’s Parnassus
he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American
tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry
Vaughan,” in _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.
[33] In one of his prefaces, Vaughan hits neatly at the crowd of
Herbertists: “These aim more at verse than at perfection.” Where there
are noble resemblances, it is well to remember that two sides have the
right to be heard. Mrs. Thoreau used to say: “Mr. Emerson imitates
Henry!” And she was at least as accurate as the critics who annoyed her
old age by the reversed statement.
[34] Mr. R. H. Stoddard owns a copy of the first edition of
_Nieremberg’s Meditations_, translated by Vaughan in 1654, and
published the following year, which has upon the title-page an
autographic “J. M.” supposed, by every evidence, to be Milton’s. If it
be so, the busy Latin Secretary, meditating his grand work, must have
been, on his part, a reader and a lover of the man who was almost his
equal at golden phrases.
[35] Congreve and Waller employ the same rather too obvious love-name
for their serenaded divinities.
[36] Vaughan openly wears jewels which belong to Jonson.
“Go seek thy peace in war: Who falls for love of God shall rise a star!”
wrote brave Father Ben; and no Englishman of spirit, between 1642 and
the Restoration, was likely to forget it. The passage certainly clung
to Vaughan’s mind, for he assimilated it later in a sweet line all for
peace:
“Do thou the works of day, and rise a star.”