Part 5

“Teach me Thy love to know, That this new light which now I see May both the work and workman show: Then by a sunbeam I will climb to Thee!”

“I will go searching, till I find a sun Shall stay till we have done, A willing shiner, that will shine as gladly As frost-nipt suns look sadly. Then we will sing and shine all our own day, And one another pay; His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine Till even his beams sing, and my music shine.”

(_Of prayer._)

“Heaven in ordinary, man well-drest, The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise.”

“Then went I to a garden, and did spy A gallant flower, The crown-imperial: Sure, said I, Peace at the root must dwell.”

VAUGHAN.

“A darting conscience, full of stabs and fears.”

“And wrap us in imaginary flights Wide of a faithful grave.”

“That in these masks and shadows I may see Thy sacred way, And by these hid ascents climb to that day Which breaks from Thee Who art in all things, though invisibly!”

“O would I were a bird or star Fluttering in woods, or lifted far Above this inn And road of sin! Then either star or bird would be Shining or singing still to Thee!”

(_Of books._)

“The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way.”

“I walked the other day to spend my hour Into a field, Where I sometime had seen the soil to yield A gallant flower.”

HERBERT.

“But groans are quick and full of wings, And all their motions upward be, And ever as they mount, like larks they sing: The note is sad, yet music for a king.”

“Joys oft are there, and griefs as oft as joys, But griefs without a noise; Yet speak they louder than distempered fears: What is so shrill as silent tears?”

“At first Thou gavest me milk and sweetnesses, I had my wish and way; My days were strewed with flowers and happiness; There was no month but May.”

“Only a scarf or glove Doth warm our hands, and make them write of Love.”

“I got me flowers to strew Thy way, I got me boughs off many a tree; But Thou wast up by break of day, And brought Thy sweets along with Thee.”

“O come! for Thou dost know the way: Or if to me Thou wilt not move, Remove me where I need not say, ‘Drop from above.’”

“Sure Thou wilt joy by gaining me To fly home like a laden bee.”

VAUGHAN.

“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.

The angels who

“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.”

FOOTNOTES:

[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.”