“C. W.’s” death was one of the things which turned him forever from temporal pursuits and pleasures. Of his first wife we can find none but conjectural traces in his books, for he was shy of using the beloved name. The sense of those departed is never far from him. The air of melancholy recollection, not morbid, which hangs over his maturer lyrics, is directly referable to the close-following calamities which estranged him from the presence of “the blessèd few,” and sent him, as he nobly hoped,
“Home from their dust to empty his own glass.”
His thoughts centred, henceforward, in their full intensity, on the supernatural world; nay, if he were irremediably depressed, not only on the persistence of resolved matter, by means of which buried men come forth again in the color of flowers and the fragrance of the wind, but even on the physical damp and dark which confine our mortality. It is the poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air who can pack horror on horror into his nervous quatrains about Death:
“A nest of nights; a gloomy sphere Where shadows thicken, and the cloud Sits on the sun’s brow all the year, And nothing moves without a shroud.”
This is masterly; but here, again, there is reserve, the curbing hand of a man who holds, with Plato, a wilful indulgence in the “realism” of sadness to be an actual crime. Vaughan’s dead dwell, indeed, as his own mind does, in “the world of light.” As his corporeal sight is always upon the zenith or the horizon, so his fancy is far away, with his radiant ideals, and with the virtue and beauty he has walked with in the flesh. He takes his harp to the topmost hill, and sits watching
“till the white-winged reapers come.”
He thinks of his obscured self, the child he was, and of “the narrow way” (an ever-recurrent Scriptural phrase in his poetry) by which he shall “travel back.” To leave the body is merely to start anew and recover strength, and, with it, the inspiring companionship of which he is inscrutably deprived.
Chambers’ _Cyclopædia_ made an epic blunder, long ago, when it ascribed to this gentlest of Anglicans a “gloomy sectarianism.” He, of all religious poets, makes the most charming secular reading, and may well be a favorite with the heathen for whom Herbert is too decorative, Crashaw too hectic and intense, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too fluent; _Lyra Apostolica_ a treatise, though a glorious one, on Things which Must be Revived, and _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ an exceeding weariness to the spirit. It is a saw of Dr. Johnson’s that it is impossible for theology to clothe itself in attractive numbers; but then Dr. Johnson was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in human nature to refuse to cherish the “holy, happy, healthy Heaven” which he has left us (in a graded alliteration which smacks of the physician rather than of the “gloomy sectarian”), his very social “angels talking to a man,” and his bright saints, hovering and smiling nigh, who
“are indeed our pillar-fires Seen as we go; They are the city’s shining spires We travel to.”
Who can resist the earnestness and candor with which, in a few sessions, he wrote down the white passion of the last fifty years of his life? No English poet, unless it be Spenser, has a piety so simple and manly, so colored with mild thought, so free from emotional consciousness. The elect given over to continual polemics do not count Henry Vaughan as one of themselves. His double purpose is to make life pleasant to others and to praise God; and he considers that he is accomplishing it when he pens a compliment to the valley grass, or, like Coleridge, caresses in some affectionate strophes the much-abused little ass. All this liberal sweetness and charity heighten Vaughan’s poetic quality, as they deepen the impression of his practical Christianity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. When he talks of moss and rocks, it is as if they were incorporated into the ritual. He has the genius of prayer, and may be recognized by “those graces which walk in a veil and a silence.” He is full of distinction, and of a sort of golden idiosyncrasy. Vaughan’s true “note” is—Vaughan. To read him is like coming alone to a village church-yard with trees, where the west is dying, in hues of lilac and rose, behind the low ivied Norman tower. The south windows are open, the young choir are within, and the organist, with many a hushed unconventional interlude of his own, is rehearsing with them the psalm of “pleasures for evermore.”
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Siluria comprised the shires of Monmouth, Hereford, Glamorgan, Radnor, and Brecon.
[21] The Reverend H. F. Lyte, Vaughan’s enthusiastic editor, best known as the author of _Abide with Me_, reminds us that there was another Henry Vaughan of the same college and the same neighborhood at home—a pleasant theological person not to be confounded with the poet. It was probably he, and not the Silurist, who devoted some verses to Charles the First in the book called _Eucharistica Oxoniensis_, 1641.
[22] These deep Augustinian lines are Carew’s, gay Carew’s; and they mark the highest religious expression of their time.
[23] Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, acquaintance with a London garret, if we may take autobiographically the fine brag worthy of the tribe of Henri Mürger:
“I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the sacred stars do circle me.”
[24] The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and my Lady Castlemaine (together, alas!) at Merton, amid endless hawking, tennis, boating, basset, and general revelry.
[25] Orinda’s own verses, scattered in manuscript among her friends, were collected and printed without her knowledge, and much against her desire, in 1663: a piece of treachery which threw her into a severe indisposition. She could therefore condole more than enough with Henry Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in those days.
[26] This, to say the least, was not “pretty” of Campbell, who thought so well of the “world’s grey fathers” congregated to gaze at Vaughan’s _Rainbow_ that he conveyed them bodily into the foreground of his own.
[27] Per´-spective was, of course, the general pronunciation from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with great beauty in Dryden’s _Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. But it is a characteristic word with Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth took it.
[28] Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing which makes the loveliness of the British isles, and which the ungrateful islanders are prone to revile. He never passes a sheet of water without looking upward for the forming cloud:
“That drowsy lake From her faint bosom breathed thee!”
[29] Sometimes erroneously printed “bowers.”
[30] It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America in his enumeration, at a time when the United States were supposed by his fellow-countrymen to have no literature at all of their own. The circumstance that his challenge appeared in the preface to _The Book of the Sonnet_, which was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an American, and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account for the mannerliness of the reference.
[31] In the _Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench_, vol. ii., p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point from Mr. Frank Millson, dated 1868, which deserves serious consideration from Vaughan’s forthcoming editors. “I think,” he writes the Dean, “that your supposition that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one of 1650, with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct, though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering’s reprint, thinks as you do. The preface to the 1655 edition is dated September 30, 1654, and contains this passage” (not given in the _Memorials_) “which seems to me to refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my two copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a sheet, title and dedication, and 110 pages. The second edition has title, preface, dedication, motto, the 110 pages of the first edition, with 84 pages of new matter, and a table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the arrangement is that the sheets do not begin with new printer’s marks, as they might be expected to do if the second part were simply new matter added to the first volume, but begin with A, the last sheet of the former volume having ended with G. I am sorry to trouble you with these trifling details; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite author of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they help to show that he was not neglected by readers of his own time, I shall be glad.”
[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always. Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his _Lives of the Poets_, published in 1687. He is not in the _Theatrum Poetarum_, nor in Johnson’s _Lives_. He is in neither of Southey’s collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in _The Golden Treasury_, but a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent _Specimens_ of 1811 furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the _Best and Most Accomplished Couple_ apologizing for “their too much quaintness and conceit”; and in Willmott’s _Sacred Poets_ Vaughan occupies four pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr. George Macdonald’s _England’s Antiphon_, and in Archbishop Trench’s _Household Book_. Ward’s _English Poets_, in the second volume, has a conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and Whipple’s _Family Library of British Poetry_. There is a goodly list entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s _Less-Known British Poets_, all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics again adorn the splendid _Treasury of Sacred Song_. Vaughan’s secular numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, has a small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave, having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial honor in the eleventh volume of _Y Cymmrodor_. In Emerson’s Parnassus he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry Vaughan,” in _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.