This is the secret of Vaughan’s blood-guiltlessness. Of course he thanked Heaven, after, that he was kept clean of carnage; he would have thanked Heaven for anything that happened to him. It was providential that we of posterity lost a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a poet. As the great confusion cleared, his spirit cleared too, and the Vaughan we know,
“Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair,”
comes in, like a protesting angel, with the Commonwealth. Perhaps he lived long enough to sum up the vanity of statecraft and the instability of public choice, driven from tyranny to license, from absolute monarchy to absolute anarchy; and to turn once more to his “loud brook’s incessant fall” as an object much worthier of a rational man’s regard. Born while James I. was vain-gloriously reigning, Henry Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the orgies of the Restoration (which he did not fail to satirize), and the Revolution of “Meenie the daughter,” as the old Scots song slyly calls her. He had seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out again, and his seventy-four years, on-lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to sit through the dull Georgian farce which began almost as soon as his grave was green.
Moreover, he was thoroughly out of touch with his surroundings. While all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying him up and sweeping him away. He might well have said, like Dr. Henry More, his twin’s rival and challenger in metaphysics, that he was “most of his time mad with pleasure.” While
“every burgess foots
The mortal pavement in eternal boots,”
Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, like a shepherd swain, pondering upon the brood of “green-heads” who denied miracles to have been or to be, and wishing the noisy passengers on the highways of life could be taught the value of
“A sweet self-privacy in a right soul.”
His mind turned to paradoxes and inverted meanings, and the analysis of his own tenacious dreams, in an England of pikes and bludgeons and hock-carts and wassail-cakes. “A proud, humoursome person,” Anthony à Wood called him. He was something of a fatalist, inasmuch as he followed his lonely and straight path, away from crowds, and felt eager for nothing but what fell into his open hands. He strove little, being convinced that temporal advantage is too often an eternal handicap. “Who breaks his glass to take more light,” he reminds us, “makes way for storms unto his rest.” This passive quality belongs to happy men, and Vaughan was a very happy man, thanks to the faith and will which made him so, although he had known calamity, and had failed in much. Throughout his pages one can trace the affecting struggle between things desired and things forborne. It is only a brave philosopher who can afford to pen a stanza intimate as this:
“O Thou who didst deny to me
The world’s adored felicity!
Keep still my weak eyes from the shine
Of those gay things which are not Thine.”