is part and parcel of the young cries of Endymion. When Vaughan has discovered something to produce a fresh effect, he is not the man who will hesitate to use it; and this mannerism occurs frequently: “our grass straight russets,” “angel’d from that sphere,” “the mountained wave,” “He heavened their walks, and with his eyes made those wild shades a Paradise.” A little informality of this sort sometimes justifies itself, as in the couplet ending the grim and powerful Charnel-House:
“But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain,
One check from thee shall channel it again!”
And Henry Vaughan shares also with Keats, writing three hundred years later, a defect which he had inherited, together with many graces, directly from Ben Jonson:[36] the fashion of crowding the sense of his text and the pauseless voice of his reader from the natural breathing-place at the end of a line into the beginning or the middle of the next line. More than any other, except Keats in his first period, he roughens, without always strengthening, his rich decasyllabics, by using what Mr. Gosse has happily classified as the “overflow.”
Though the Silurist had in him the possibilities of a great elegiac poet, and his laments for his dead are many and memorable, there is not one sustained masterpiece among them; nothing to equal or approach, for example, Cowley’s Ode on the Death of Mr. William Hervey, in the qualities which abide, and are visited with the honors of the class-book and the library shelf. Yet Vaughan’s elegies are exquisite and endearing; they haunt one with the conviction that they stop short of immortality, not because their author had too little skill, but because, between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions, no art could make out to live. He had a deep heart, such as deep hearts will always recognize and reverence:
“And thy two wings were grief and love.”
In the face of eternity he seems so to accord with the event which all but destroys him, that sorrow inexpressible becomes suddenly unexpressed, and his funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm and serenity open to no misconception. Distance, and the lapse of time, and his own utter reconciliation to the play of events make small difference in his utterance upon the old topic. The thought of his friend, forty years after, is the same mystical rapture:
“O could I track them! but souls must
Track one the other;