[8] Edward Herbert served as a volunteer in the campaign of 1614-15 in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange. Richard Herbert, here mentioned, was his eldest son, a future Cavalier and captain of a troop of horse in the Civil Wars; Edward was the baby, and “Bettye” the child Beatrice, destined, like her sister, to a short life.
[9] This 1614-15 was an eccentric and un-English year throughout. The winter signalized itself by the Great Snow; “_frigus intensum_,” as Camden says, “_et nix copiosissima_.”
[10] Lord Bacon dedicated to Edward Herbert, “the father of English deists,” his very flat translation of the Psalms! George wrote three Latin poems in his honor, one being upon the occasion of his death.
[11] He was, in July of 1626, ordained deacon, and prebendary of Layton Ecclesia in Huntingdonshire. Readers of Walton will remember how his dear mother invited him to commit simony on that occasion.
[12] The standing marble figure in a winding-sheet which Dr. King had modelled upon this strange painting on wood, may yet be seen in the south ambulatory of the choir of St. Paul’s; almost the only relic saved from the old cathedral which perished in the Great Fire of 1666. It is not only of unique interest, but of considerable artistic beauty, and “seems to breathe faintly,” as Sir Henry Wotton said of it.
[13] Dr. Donne’s papers were bequeathed to Dr. Henry King, the poet-Bishop of Chichester, then residentiary of St. Paul’s. The “find” were a precious one, if they yet survive.
[14] The half-romantic reference, which occurs more than once in Donne’s poems, to his own long-dead arm which still shall keep
“The bracelet of bright hair about the bone,”—
has it nothing to do with this blond head? _Honi soit qui mal y pense._ The internal evidences in _The Relic_, with its mention of St. Mary Magdalen, and its boast of purest friendship, and the roguery of the closing line in _The Funeral_, are somewhat strong, nevertheless.
[15] The famous _Autobiography_, indeed, boldly assures posterity that Lady Herbert, after 1597, “continued unmarried,” and, in brief, “was the woman Dr. Donne hath described her.” The acknowledgment of the accuracy of that funeral sermon, containing, as it does, its very specific Danvers passages, is in our fearless philosopher’s best style.
[16] There was afterwards, in France, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber who had other notions. “Gratitude,” said Thierry to his executioner in the court-yard of the Abbaye—“gratitude has no opinions. I am leal to my master.”
[17] An elder Charles, son of the Lady Elizabeth Danvers, was baptized in 1632, and must have died early.
[18] Edward Herbert sided eventually with the Parliament, which indemnified him for the burning and sacking of Montgomery Castle.
[19] The six very innocent, cheerful, pious ten-syllable stanzas, attributed in _The Complete Angler_ to “another angler, Jo. Davors, Esq.,” are not, it is hardly necessary to add, from our scapegrace’s pen. He ceased to be “Jo. Davors, Esq.,” when Walton was fourteen years old.
II
HENRY VAUGHAN
1621-1695
IN his own person, Henry Vaughan left no trace in society. His life seemed to slip by like the running water on which he was forever gazing and moralizing, and his memory met early with the fate which he hardly foresaw. Descended from the royal chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus mentions, and whose abode, in the day of Roman domination, was in the district called Siluria,[20] he called himself the Silurist upon his title-pages; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of epitaphs, close by his home in the glorious valley of the Usk and the little Honddu, under the shadow of Tretower, the ruined castle of his race, and of Pen-y-Fan and his kindred peaks. What we know of him is a sort of pastoral: how he was born, the son of a poor gentleman, in 1621, at Newton St. Bridget, in the old house yet asleep on the road between Brecon and Crickhowel; how he went up to Oxford, Laud’s Oxford, with Thomas, his twin, as a boy of sixteen, to be entered at Jesus College;[21] how he took his degree (just where and when no one can discover), and came back, after a London revel, to be the village physician, though he was meant for the law, in what had become his brother’s parish of Llansantffraed; to write books full of sequestered beauty, to watch the most tragic of wars, to look into the faces of love and loss, and to spend his thoughtful age on the bowery banks of the river he had always known, his _Isca parens florum_, to which he consecrated many a sweet English line. And the ripple of the not unthankful Usk was “distinctly audible over its pebbles,” as was the Tweed to the failing sense of Sir Walter, in the room where Henry Vaughan drew his last breath, on St. George’s day, April 23, 1695. He died exactly seventy-nine years after Shakespeare, exactly one hundred and fifty-five years before Wordsworth.
Circumstances had their way with him, as with most poets. He knew the touch of disappointment and renunciation, not only in life, but in his civic hopes and in his art. He broke his career in twain, and began over, before he had passed thirty; and he showed great æsthetic discretion, as well as disinterestedness, in replacing his graceful early verses by the deep dedications of his prime. Religious faith and meditation seem so much part of his innermost nature, it is a little difficult to remember that Vaughan considered himself a brand snatched from the burning, a lawless Cavalier brought by the best of chances to the quiet life, and the feet of the moral Muse. He suffered most of the time between 1643 and 1651 from a sorely protracted and nearly fatal illness; and during its progress his wife and his dearest friends were taken from him. Nor was the execution of the King a light event to so sensitive a poet and so passionate a partisan. Meanwhile Vaughan read George Herbert, and his theory of proportional values began to change. It was a season of transition and silent crises, when men bared their breasts to great issues, and when it was easy for a childlike soul,
“Weary of her vain search below, above, In the first Fair to find the immortal Love.”[22]
Vaughan, in his new fervor, did his best to suppress the numbers written in his youth, thus clearing the field for what he afterwards called his “hagiography”; and a critic may wonder what he found in his first tiny volume of 1646, or in _Olor Iscanus_, to regret or cancel. Every unbaptized song is “bright only in its own innocence, and kindles nothing but a generous thought”; and one of them, at least, has a manly postlude of love and resolve worthy of the free lyres of Lovelace and Montrose. Vaughan, unlike other ardent spirits of his class, had nothing very gross to be sorry for; if he was, indeed, one of his own
“feverish souls, Sick with a scarf or glove,”
he had none but noble ravings. Happily, his very last verses, _Thalia Rediviva_, breaking as it were by accident a silence of twenty-three years, indorse with cheerful gallantry the accents of his youth. The turn in his life which brought him lasting peace, in a world rocking between the cant of the Parliament and resurgent audacity and riot, achieved for us a body of work which, small as it is, has rare interest, and an out-of-door beauty, as of the natural dusk, “breathless with adoration,” which is almost without parallel. Eternity has been known to spoil a poet for time, but not in this instance. Never did religion and art interchange a more fortunate service, outside Italian studios. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions, Vaughan’s voice grew at once freer and more forceful. In him a marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual readjustment, even as it did, three centuries later, in one greater than he, John Henry Newman.
Vaughan’s work is thickly sown with personalities, but they are so delicate and involved that there is little profit in detaching them. What record he made at the University is not apparent; nor is it at all sure that so independent and speculative a mind applied itself gracefully to the curriculum. He was, in the only liberal sense, a learned man, full of life-long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden Tree. His lines beginning
“Quite spent with thought I left my cell”
show the acutest thirst for hidden knowledge; he would “most gladly die,” if death might buy him intellectual growth. He looks forward to eternity as to the unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. He makes the soul sing joyously to the body:
“I that here saw darkly, in a glass, But mists and shadows pass, And by their own weak shine did search the springs And source of things, Shall, with inlighted rays, Pierce all their ways!”
With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:
“Who circled in Corruption with this glorious ring?”
What Vaughan does know is nothing to him; when he salutes the Bodleian from his heart, he is thinking how little honey he has gathered from that vast hive, and how little it contains, when measured with what there is to learn from living and dying. He had small respect for the sinister sciences among which the studies of his beloved brother, a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no pedant, he dearly loved to get in a slap against the ignorant whom we have always with us. At twenty-five, he printed a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juvenal, and flourished his wit, in the preface, at the expense of some possible gentle reader of the parliamentary persuasion who would “quarrel with antiquitie.” “These, indeed, may think that they have slept out so many centuries in this Satire, and are now awaked; which had it been still Latin, perhaps their nap had been everlasting!”