He was hospitable on a limited income. His verses of invitation To his Retired Friend, which are not without their thrusts at passing events, have a classic jollity fit to remind the reader of Randolph's ringing ode to Master Anthony Stafford. Again and again Vaughan reiterates the Socratic song of content: that he has enough lands and money, that there are a thousand things he does not want, that he is blessed in what he has. All this does not prevent him from recording the phenomenal ebb tides of his purse, and from whimsically synthesizing on "the threadbare, goldless genealogie" of bards! No sour zealot in anything, he enjoyed an evening now and then at the Globe Tavern, in London, where he consumed his sack with relish, that he might be "possessor of more soul," and "after full cups have dreams poetical." But he was no lover of the town. Country life was his joy and pride; the only thing which seemed, in his own most vivid phrase, to "fill his breast with home." A literary acquaintance, one unrecognized N. W., congratulates Vaughan that he is able to "give his Muse the swing in an hereditary shade." He was an angler, need it be added? Nay, the autocrat of anglers, he was a salmon-catcher. The poets who did not fight for the king were commonly supposed to redeem their reputation by dying of grief, like Drummond of Hawthornden, at his overthrow. Yet Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did not die of grief. It is so sure that he suffered some privation, and it may be imprisonment, for his allegiance that shrewd guesses, before now, have equipped him, and placed him in the ranks of the losing cause, where he might have had choice company. His generous, erratic brother (an alchemist, an Orientalist, and a Rosicrucian, who was ejected from his vicarage in 1654, and died, either of the plague or of inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Albury, in 1665, while the court was at Oxford) had been a recruit, and Of his vowed heart, whom Thou hast kept From bloody men!" This painstaking record of a fact by one so loyal as he goes far to prove, to an inductive mind not thoroughly familiar with his circumstances, that he considered war the worst of current evils, and was willing, for this first principle of his philosophy, to lay himself open to the charge, not indeed of cowardice (was he not a Vaughan ?), but of lack of appreciation for the one romantic opportunity of his life. His withdrawal from the turmoil which so became his colleagues may be counted in with his known moral courage and right sentiment; and one's fancy is ready to fasten on Vaughan's sad neutrality the passionate "ingemination" for "peace, peace," which "took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart," such as Clarendon tells us of in his ever-beautiful passage touching the young Lord Falkland. But it is greatly to be feared that Vaughan, despite all the abstract reasoning which arrays itself against so babyish and barbarous a thing as a battle, would have swung himself into a saddle against the existing government as readily as any, had not "God's finger touched him." A comparison of dates will show that he was bedridden, while his hot heart was afield with the shouting gentlemen whom Mr. Browning heard in a vision : — for anything that happened to him. It was providential that we of posterity lost a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a poet. As the great confusion cleared, his spirit cleared, too, and the Vaughan we know, "Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair," comes in, like a protesting angel, with the Commonwealth. Perhaps he lived long enough to sum up the vanity of statecraft and the instability of public choice, driven from tyranny to license, from absolute monarchy to absolute anarchy, and to turn once more to his "loud brook's incessant fall" as an object much worthier of a rational man's regard. Born while James I. was vaingloriously reigning, Henry Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the orgies of the Restoration (which he did not fail to satirize), and the Revolution of "Meenie the daughter," as the old Scots song slyly calls her. He had seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out again, and his seventy-four years, on-lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to sit through the dull Georgian farce which began almost as soon as his grave was green. Moreover, he was thoroughly out of touch with his times. While all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying him up and sweeping him away. He might well have said, like Dr. Henry More, his twin's rival and challenger in metaphysics, that he was most of his time mad with pleasure." While 66 "every burgess foots The mortal pavement in eternal boots," Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, like a shepherd swain, pondering upon the brood of "green-heads " who denied miracles to have been or to be, and wishing the noisy passengers on the highways of life could be taught the value of "A sweet self-privacy in a right soul." 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. All through his pages one can trace the affecting struggle between things desired and things forborne. It is only a brave philosopher who can af ford 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. 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. The clerical brother 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 dispatches 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 well-nigh 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 " enamored 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. 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 who crowd their lines with thought do 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, Vaughan played habitually with his pauses, and unconsciously threw the metrical stress on words least able to bear it; but no sensitive ear can be otherwise than pleased at the broken sequence of such straight from life. He has the inevita lines as, "These birds of light make a land glad, Chirping their solemn matins on a tree," and "As if his liquid loose retinue stayed Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid." The word "perspective," which he introduced with the accent upon the first syllable, was a favorite with him; and Wordsworth thought well enough of that usage to employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King's College Chapel. 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, which "in the clear height and upmost air Doth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!” That Vaughan's pages should furnish this patient specification of natural objects is remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze is the remote 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: upon "O that he would hear The world read to him!" Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself sees and hears; and his interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, Candies our country's woody brow." It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Henry 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. 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." Vaughan, a humanist of the school of Assisi, 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." "I saw," he says suddenly, "I saw Eternity the other night; " and he is forever 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. Light, indeed, is Vaughan's distinctive word, and the favorite source of his similes and illustrations. Vaughan's meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four critics perfectly fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime; but, curiously enough, none of these, not even the best en name. of them, the same Charles Lamb who said a just and generous word for Wither, had the satisfaction of rescuing his sunkEight little books inclose all of the Silurist's work. He began to publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, breaking his after-silence but twice, with Thalia Rediviva in 1678, and a translation of Nieremberg's Meditations in 1682. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten up to the date, 1847, of the faulty edition of the Rev. H. F. Lyte, and until the appearance of Dr. Grosart's inestimable quartos; but Mr. Carew Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an eighteenth-century Vaughan reprint. As the results of Dr. Grosart's patient service to our elder choir 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. 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 unique and sylvan voice out of Brecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modeled himself unduly upon George Herbert. 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, as his thrilling and unforgettable self. 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 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 |