introduces a fancy when Marino is content for a moment to be plain. Here are one or two specimens from those collected by Wilmott and Grosart : 'He saw Heav'n blossom with a new-born light, On which as on a glorious stranger gazed literally in Marino 'He sees also shining from heaven, With beauteous ray, the wondrous star.' When Alecto rises in Marino 'The fields' fair eyes saw her and said no more, The flowers all round and the verdure appears To feel the strength of the plague, the anger of winter.' Such imagery does not tax invention: one can put eyes everywhere and turn eyes into everything. We have only to turn to The Weeper, a poem upon St. Mary Magdalen which Pope read with interest. The saint's eyes are 'When sorrow would be seen In her brightest majesty (For she is a Queen), Then is she drest by none but thee. Then and only then she wears Her proudest pearls: I mean, thy tears.' In the next stanzas we get something better: 'Nowhere but here did ever meet Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.' 'Gladness itself would be more glad Even Crashaw meant these for alternatives, but he likes to linger; he spins the 23rd psalm into three dozen couplets. The Stabat Mater is very far from being the severest of mediæval hymns, but there is an appropriateness in Crashaw's own title for his paraphrase 'A Pathetical descant on the devout Plain Song of the Church,' as though he were a pianist performing variations upon a classical air. He extemporises at ease in his rooms at Peterhouse, then the ritualistic college of Cambridge. Like Herbert he was a piece of a courtier, but he did not go to court to seek his fortune, he found nothing there but materials for a sketch of the supposed mistress who never disturbed his pious vigils. Of the three he is the only one who seems to have known no inward struggles; he passes from Peterhouse to Loretto as pilgrims pass from one chapel to another in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There is no substantial difference between the tone of the poem to St. Theresa, written before his change of profession, and the two which he wrote after. If anything, the earlier poem is more serious and reverent. The wonderful close of the poem on the Flaming Heart is more wonderful because it comes after an atrocious and prolonged conceit to the effect that the saint's heart would not be inflamed by the arrow of the seraph, but was fit to inflame that and all creatures beside. Vaughan only began to be a poet when Crashaw's career was over; and he did not continue to be a poet to any purpose long. Everything he wrote before or after the two parts of Silex Scintillans might be spared. He is a mystic, as Herbert is an ascetic and Crashaw a devotee. Herbert's temptation is the world, Vaughan's temptation is the flesh; the special service that Herbert does him is to lift his mind from profane love to sacred. He is quite pathetic in the preface to Silex Scintillans about his early loose love-poetry. He suppressed the worst of it, and adjures his reader to leave the sufficiently harmless collection which escaped him unread. When he was seven and twenty years older (he would not have thought wiser) he collected some more of his love verses equally innocent and rather insignificant. Amoret and Etesia are less interesting than Saccharissa and Althea and Castara. Perhaps Etesia's name implies that she was good to love for a year and no longer. The long interval of twenty-two years between the second part of Silex Scintillans and Thalia Rediviva, is filled mainly by little translations of works of edification and a few original prayers. The prayers are rather too like sermons, and the title Silex Scintillans implies that his heart was a stone from which sparks might be struck now and then. He is as full as Herbert of the fluctuations of his own feelings, and as ready to interpret any failure of power as a judgment, as ready too to lecture upon his spiritual experience for the instruction of his reader. In both the lesson is the same, that external disappointments are good for the inner life. For Vaughan too rebelled against his circumstances: after Oxford and a riotous holiday in London, it was dull to settle down at Brecknock the world had not promissed so much to him as to Herbert, but it performed even less. The Mutiny reminds us of The Collar, as Rules and Maxims remind us of The Church Porch. The Tempest recalls Providence, and in Sundays the coincidence is even closer: again, The' Queer,' as we should now say The Riddle, is obviously suggested by The Quip. Even the complaint that men inflame themselves with a scarf or glove is borrowed from Herbert, who knew the world better than Vaughan, and gives pointed counsel and criticism, where Vaughan grumbles at the poverty of poets or the weight of a cloak. On the other hand, he knows nature much better. Herbert has no feeling for anything but the sweetness of flowers and sunshine, Vaughan feels the awe of the freshness of morning among the Welsh mountains. It is in morning walks that he meets God; early rising is the one original recommendation in Rules and Maxims. The sanctity and insight of childhood are more to him than even to Wordsworth. Many religious writers speak of this life as an exile, Vaughan carries the metaphor through we are exiles not only from the home we seek but from the home we have left. He even suspects the stars may have something to do with the uncompensated misfortune of birth into a world of time and sense. His twin brother Thomas studied alchemy not as a means to the transmutation of metals, but as a key to the hidden unity of nature. In his own translations Henry Vaughan uses Neoplatonists quite as familiarly as Jesuits. His prose is rich and musical; his few Latin poems mostly insignificant, more pointless than Herbert's and quite without the airy grace of Crashaw's Bubble, of which Mr. Grosart has made a very pretty English poem. His translations from Ovid and Juvenal are rough and cumbrous; he writes decasyllabics very badly compared not only with Sandys but with Crashaw, whose description of a Religious House contains one line, 'Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,' worthy of Pope. His translations in octosyllabics from Casimir and Boethius are excellent, especially the poem on the Golden Age from Boethius, G. A. SIMCOX. SANDYS. FROM THE 'PARAPHRASE UPON LUKE I.' O praise the Lord, his wonders tell, At length redeem'd from sin and hell. The crown of our salvation, This to His prophets did unfold, That He our wrongs would vindicate, His promis'd grace, by oath decreed, That we might our Preserver praise, His path Thou shalt prepare, sweet Child, And Prophet of th' Almighty styl❜d. Our knowledge to inform, from whence And pardon of each foul offence. Through mercy, O how infinite! Of our Great God, Who clears our sight, A leading Star t'enlighten those HERBERT. THE COLLAR. I struck the board, and cry'd, 'No more; What, shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the road, Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn Is the year only lost to me? Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted, Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute Which petty thoughts have made; and made to thee And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there, tie up thy fears; He that forbears To suit and serve his need Deserves his load.' |