Part 4

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.

HERBERT.

“A throbbing conscience, spurrèd by remorse, Hath a strange force.”

“My thoughts are all a case of knives, Wounding my heart With scattered smart.”

“And trust Half that we have Unto an honest faithful grave.”