Part 5

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.”

“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.