“That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture.”
That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification is remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze is upon the inaccessible ether, but he seems to detect everything between himself and heaven. He sighs over the inattentive rustic, whom, perhaps, he catches scowling by the pasture-bars of the wild Welsh downs:
“O that he would hear
The world read to him!”
Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself hears and sees; and his interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, straight from life. He has the inevitable phrase for every phenomenon, a little low-comedy phrase, sometimes, such as Shakespeare and Carew had used before him:
“Deep snow
Candies our country’s woody brow.”