To gather flowers and welcome Thee.”
“Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass;
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
Where I shall need no glass!”
“Thy grave, to which my thoughts shall move
Like bees in storms unto their hive.”
To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal assizes of literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses it. Herbert’s odd and fresh metaphors, his homing bees and pricks of conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and the comrade bird, even his famous female scarf, go over bodily to the spoiler. In many an instance something involved and difficult still characterizes Herbert’s diction; and it is diverting to watch how the interfering hand sorts and settles it at one touch, and sends it, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s word, to the “centre.” Vaughan’s mind, despite its mysticism, was full of despatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself, more than once, as “fierce”; and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him. There is in Vaughan, at his height, an imaginative rush and fire which Herbert never knew, a greater clarity and conciseness, a far greater restraint, a keener sense both of color and form, and so much more deference for what Mr. Ruskin calls “the peerage of words,” that the younger man could never have been content to send forth a line which might mean its opposite, such as occurs in the fine stanza about glory in the beautiful Quip. It is only on middle ground that the better poet and the better saint collide. Vaughan never could have written
“O that I once past changing were