Beneath the oak and juniper,”
invoke an instant thought of the Milton of the Allegro; and the fragrant winds which linger by Usk, “loaden with the rich arrear,” appear to be Milton’s, too. His austere music first sounded in the public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, much his junior, began to print. It would seem very unlikely that a Welsh physician should be beholden long after to the manuscripts of the Puritan stripling, close-kept at Cambridge and Horton; but it is interesting to find the prototype of Vaughan’s charming lines about Rachel,
“the sheep-keeping Syrian maid,”
in the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, dating from 1631.[34] Vaughan’s dramatic Fleet Street,
“Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way,”
might as well be Swift’s, or Crabbe’s; and his salutation to the lark,
“And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light,
Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing,”
is like a quotation from some tender sonnet of Bowles, or from his admirer, the young Coleridge who instantly outstepped him. Olor, Silex, and Thalia establish unexpected relationships with genius the most remote from them and from each other. The animated melody of poor Rochester’s best songs seems deflected from