His verses have the tone of a Vandyck portrait, with all its firm pensive elegance and lack of shadow.
Vaughan has very little quaintness, as we now understand that word, and none of the cloudiness and incorrigible grotesqueness which dominated his Alexandrian day. He has great temperance; he keeps his eye upon the end, and scarcely falls at all into “the fond adulteries of art,” inversions, unscholarly compound words, or hard-driven metaphors. If he be difficult to follow, it is only because he lives, as it were, in highly oxygenated air; he is remote and peculiar, but not eccentric. His conceits are not monstrous; the worst of them proclaims:
“Some love a rose
In hand, some in the skin;
But, cross to those,
I would have mine within”;
which will bear a comparison with Carew’s hatched cherubim, or with that very provincialism of Herbert’s which describes a rainbow as the lace of Peace’s coat! Those of Vaughan’s figures not drawn from the open air, where he was happiest, are, indeed, too bold and too many, and they come from strange corners: from finance, medicine, mills, the nursery, and the mechanism of watches and clocks. In no one instance, however, does he start wrong, like the great influencer, Donne, in The Valediction, and finish by turning such impediments as “stiff twin-compasses” into images of memorable beauty. The Encyclopædia Britannica, like Campbell, finds Vaughan “untunable,” and so he is very often. But poets may not always succeed in metaphysics and in music too. The lute which has the clearest and most enticing twang under the laurel boughs is Herrick’s, and not Donne’s; Mr. Swinburne’s, and not Mr. Browning’s. It is to be observed that when Vaughan lets go of his regrets, his advice, and his growls over the bad times, he falls into instant melody, as if in that, and not in a rough impressiveness, were his real strength. His blessing for the river Usk flows sweetly as the tide it hangs upon:
“Garlands, and songs, and roundelays,
And dewy nights, and sunshine days,
The turtle’s voice, joy without fear,
Dwell on thy bosom all the year!
To thee the wind from far shall bring
The odors of the scattered spring,
And, loaden with the rich arrear,
Spend it in spicy whispers here.”
Vaughan played habitually with his pauses, and unconsciously threw the metrical stress on syllables and words least able to bear it; but no sensitive ear can be otherwise than pleased at the broken sequence of such lines as