which etches for you the whole winding lane, roofed and floored with beauty; he carries a reader over half a continent in his
“Paths that are hidden from the vulture’s eyes,”
and suspends him above man’s planet altogether with his audacious eagle, to whom “whole seas are narrow spectacles,” and who
“in the clear height and upmost air
Doth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!”
Besides this large vision, Vaughan had uncommon knowledge how to employ detail, during the prolonged literary interval when it was wholly out of fashion. It has been the lot of the little rhymesters of all periods to deal with the open air in a general way, and to embellish their pages with birds and boughs; but it takes a true modern poet, under the influence of the Romantic revival, to sum up perfectly the ravages of wind and frost:
“Where is the pride of summer, the green prime,
The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three
On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree”;
and it takes another to give the only faithful and ideal report of a warbling which every schoolboy of the race had heard before him: