It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Vaughan to love, or serve, art and nature for themselves. His cue was to walk abroad circumspectly and with incessant reverence, because in all things he found God. He marks, at every few rods in the thickets, “those low violets of Thine,” and the “breathing sacrifice” of earth-odors which the “parched and thirsty isle” gratefully sends back after a shower.[28] His prayer is that he may not forget that physical beauty is a great symbol, but only a symbol; a “hid ascent” through “masks and shadows” to the divine; or, as Mr. Lowell said in one of his last poems,
“a tent
Pitched for an Inmate far more excellent.”
A humanist of the school of Assisi, Vaughan was full of out-of-door meeknesses and pieties, nowhere sweeter in their expression than in this all-embracing valedictory:
“O knowing, glorious Spirit! when
Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,
*****
Give him among Thy works a place
Who in them loved and sought Thy face.”
He muses in the garden, at evenfall: