“from the right
The white sheep pass into a whiter light.”
Here the figure beautifully forecasts a famous one of Rossetti’s. Light, indeed, is Vaughan’s distinctive word, and the favorite source of his similes and illustrations.
If Vaughan’s had not been so profoundly moral a nature, he would have lacked his picturesque sense of the general, the continuous. That shibboleth, “a primrose by the river’s brim,” is to him all the generations of all the yellow primroses smiling there since the Druids’ day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects the hope and fear and pathos of the mortal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted it, age after age. Whatever he meets upon his walk is drowned and dimmed in a wide halo of association and sympathy. His unmistakable accent marks the opening of a little sermon called The Timber; a sigh of pity, tender as a child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs:
“Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springs
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,
Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29]