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.