(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the eighth chapter to the Romans), come home with a smile to the lover of Clough. Vaughan was that dangerous person, an original thinker; and the consequence is that he compromises a great many authors who may never have heard of him. It is admitted now that we owe to his prophetic lyre one of the boasts of modern literature. Dr. Grosart has handled so well the obvious debt of Wordsworth in The Intimations of Immortality, and has proven so conclusively that Vaughan figured in the library at Rydal Mount, that little need be said here on that theme. In Corruption, Childhood, Looking Back, and The Retreat, most markedly in the first, lie the whole point and pathos of
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From Heaven, which is our home.”
Few studies are more fascinating than that of the liquidation, so to speak, of Vaughan’s brief, tense, impassioned monodies into “the mighty waters rolling evermore” of the great Ode. It is Holinshed’s accidental honor that he is lost in Shakespeare, and incorporated with him. So with Vaughan: if shorn of his dues, he still remains illustrious by virtue of one signal service to Wordsworth, whom, in the main, he distinctly foreshadows. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be jealous that the “first sprightly runnings” of a classic should not be better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes. In the broad range of English letters we find two persons whose normal mental habits seem altogether of a piece with Vaughan’s: a woman of the eighteenth century, and a philosopher of the nineteenth. The lovely Petition for an Absolute Retreat, by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (whose genius was the charming trouvaille of Mr. Edmund Gosse), might pass for Vaughan’s, in Vaughan’s best manner; and so might
“Their near camp my spirit knows
By signs gracious as rainbows,”
as indeed the whole of Emerson’s ever-memorable Forerunners, itself a mate for The Retreat; or rather, had these been anonymous lyrics of Vaughan’s own day, it would have been impossible to persuade a Caroline critic that he could not name their common author.
Our poet had a curious fashion of coining verbs and adjectives out of nouns, and carried it to such a degree as to challenge pre-eminence with Keats.
“O how it bloods
And spirits all my earth!”