“Garlands, and songs, and roundelays, And dewy nights, and sunshine days, The turtle’s voice, joy without fear, Dwell on thy bosom all the year! To thee the wind from far shall bring The odors of the scattered spring, And, loaden with the rich arrear, Spend it in spicy whispers here.”
Vaughan played habitually with his pauses, and unconsciously threw the metrical stress on syllables and words least able to bear it; but no sensitive ear can be otherwise than pleased at the broken sequence of such lines as
“these birds of light make a land glad Chirping their solemn matins on a tree,”
and the hesitant symbolism of
“As if his liquid loose retinue stayed Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid.”
The word “perspective,” with the accent upon the first syllable, was a favorite with him; and Wordsworth approved of that usage enough to employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King’s College Chapel.[27] In short, if Vaughan be “untunable,” it is because he never learned to distil vowels at the expense or peril of the message which he believed himself bound to deliver, even where hearers were next to none, and which he tried only to make compact and clear. His speech has a deep and free harmony of its own, to those whom abruptness does not repel; and even critics who turn from him to the masters of verbal sound may do him the parting honor of acknowledging the nature of his limitation.
“A noble error, and but seldom made, When poets are by too much force betrayed!”
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, to whom “whole seas are narrow spectacles,” and who
“in the clear height and upmost air Doth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!”
Besides this large vision, Vaughan had uncommon knowledge how to employ detail, during the prolonged literary interval when it was wholly out of fashion. It has been the lot of the little rhymesters of all periods to deal with the open air in a general way, and to embellish their pages with birds and boughs; but it takes a true modern poet, under the influence of the Romantic revival, to sum up perfectly the ravages of wind and frost:
“Where is the pride of summer, the green prime, The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree”;
and it takes another to give the only faithful and ideal report of a warbling which every schoolboy of the race had heard before him:
“That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture.”
That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification is remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze is upon the 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:
“O that he would hear The world read to him!”
Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself hears and sees; and his interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, straight from life. He has the inevitable phrase for every phenomenon, a little low-comedy phrase, sometimes, such as Shakespeare and Carew had used before him:
“Deep snow Candies our country’s woody brow.”
It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of 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. He marks, at every few rods in the thickets, “those low violets of Thine,” and the “breathing sacrifice” of earth-odors which the “parched and thirsty isle” gratefully sends back after a shower.[28] 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.”
A humanist of the school of Assisi, Vaughan 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.”
He muses in the garden, at evenfall:
“Man is such a marigold As shuts, and hangs the head.”
Clouds, seasons, and the eternal stars are his playfellows; he apostrophizes our sister the rainbow, and reminds her of yesterday, when
“Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot, The youthful world’s grey fathers, in one knot,”
lifted anxious looks to her new splendor. He is familiar with the depression which comes from boding weather, when
“a pilgrim’s eye, Far from relief, Measures the melancholy sky.”
He has an artist’s feeling, also, for the wrath of the elements, which inevitably hurry him on to the consummation
“When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred store Of thunders in that heat, And low as e’er they lay before Thy six-days buildings beat!”
“I saw,” he says, suddenly—
“I saw Eternity the other night”;
and he is perpetually 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’s. Light, indeed, is Vaughan’s distinctive word, and the favorite source of his similes and illustrations.
If Vaughan’s had not been so profoundly moral a nature, he would have lacked his picturesque sense of the general, the continuous. That shibboleth, “a primrose by the river’s brim,” is to him all the generations of all the yellow primroses smiling there since the Druids’ day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects the hope and fear and pathos of the mortal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted it, age after age. Whatever he meets upon his walk is drowned and dimmed in a wide halo of association and sympathy. His unmistakable accent marks the opening of a little sermon called _The Timber_; a sigh of pity, tender as a child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs:
“Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springs Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings, Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29]
Leigh Hunt once challenged England and America[30] to produce anything approaching, for music and feeling, the beauty of
“boughs that shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
He forgot the closes of these artless lines of a minor poet; or he did not know them.
Vaughan’s meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four critics eminently fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime; but, curiously enough, none of these, not even the best of them, the same Charles Lamb who said a just and generous word for Wither, had the satisfaction of rescuing his sunken name. Lamb’s friend, the good soul Bernard Barton, seems, however, to have known and admired his Vaughan.
Eight little books, if we count the two parts of _Silex Scintillans_ as one,[31] enclose all of the Silurist’s original work. He began to publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, reappearing but in 1678 with _Thalia Rediviva_, which was not issued under his own supervision. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten up to the date (1847) of the faulty but timely Aldine edition of the Rev. H. F. Lyte, thrice reprinted and revised since then, and until the appearance of Dr. Grosart’s four inestimable quartos; but Mr. Carew Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. As the results of Dr. Grosart’s patient service to our elder writers 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.[32] 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 sylvan voice out of Brecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modelled himself unduly upon George Herbert.[33] He has gone into eclipse behind that gracious name.