VAUGHAN.
“A silent tear can pierce Thy throne
When loud joys want a wing;
And sweeter airs stream from a groan
Than any artèd string.”
“Follow the cry no more! There is
An ancient way,
All strewed with flowers and happiness,
And fresh as May!”
“feverish souls
Sick with a scarf or glove.”
“I’ll get me up before the sun,
I’ll cull me boughs off many a tree;
And all alone full early run
To gather flowers and welcome Thee.”
“Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass;
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
Where I shall need no glass!”
“Thy grave, to which my thoughts shall move
Like bees in storms unto their hive.”
To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal assizes of literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses it. Herbert’s odd and fresh metaphors, his homing bees and pricks of conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and the comrade bird, even his famous female scarf, go over bodily to the spoiler. In many an instance something involved and difficult still characterizes Herbert’s diction; and it is diverting to watch how the interfering hand sorts and settles it at one touch, and sends it, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s word, to the “centre.” Vaughan’s mind, despite its mysticism, was full of despatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself, more than once, as “fierce”; and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him. There is in Vaughan, at his height, an imaginative rush and fire which Herbert never knew, a greater clarity and conciseness, a far greater restraint, a keener sense both of color and form, and so much more deference for what Mr. Ruskin calls “the peerage of words,” that the younger man could never have been content to send forth a line which might mean its opposite, such as occurs in the fine stanza about glory in the beautiful Quip. It is only on middle ground that the better poet and the better saint collide. Vaughan never could have written
“O that I once past changing were
Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!”
or the tranquil confession of faith:
“Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy hands made both, and I am there:
Thy power and love, my love and trust
Make one place everywhere!”
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.
“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.”