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.