“these birds of light make a land glad
Chirping their solemn matins on a tree,”
and the hesitant symbolism of
“As if his liquid loose retinue stayed
Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid.”
The word “perspective,” with the accent upon the first syllable, was a favorite with him; and Wordsworth approved of that usage enough to employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King’s College Chapel.[27] In short, if Vaughan be “untunable,” it is because he never learned to distil vowels at the expense or peril of the message which he believed himself bound to deliver, even where hearers were next to none, and which he tried only to make compact and clear. His speech has a deep and free harmony of its own, to those whom abruptness does not repel; and even critics who turn from him to the masters of verbal sound may do him the parting honor of acknowledging the nature of his limitation.
“A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed!”
Vaughan was a born observer, and in his poetry may be found the pioneer expression of the nineteenth-century feeling for landscape. His canvas is not often large; he had an indifference towards the exquisite presence of autumn, and an inland ignorance of the sea. But he could portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines:
“It was high spring, and all the way
Primrosed, and hung with shade,”