From her faint bosom breathed thee!”
[29] Sometimes erroneously printed “bowers.”
[30] It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America in his enumeration, at a time when the United States were supposed by his fellow-countrymen to have no literature at all of their own. The circumstance that his challenge appeared in the preface to The Book of the Sonnet, which was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an American, and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account for the mannerliness of the reference.
[31] In the Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench, vol. ii., p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point from Mr. Frank Millson, dated 1868, which deserves serious consideration from Vaughan’s forthcoming editors. “I think,” he writes the Dean, “that your supposition that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one of 1650, with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct, though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering’s reprint, thinks as you do. The preface to the 1655 edition is dated September 30, 1654, and contains this passage” (not given in the Memorials) “which seems to me to refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my two copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a sheet, title and dedication, and 110 pages. The second edition has title, preface, dedication, motto, the 110 pages of the first edition, with 84 pages of new matter, and a table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the arrangement is that the sheets do not begin with new printer’s marks, as they might be expected to do if the second part were simply new matter added to the first volume, but begin with A, the last sheet of the former volume having ended with G. I am sorry to trouble you with these trifling details; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite author of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they help to show that he was not neglected by readers of his own time, I shall be glad.”
[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always. Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his Lives of the Poets, published in 1687. He is not in the Theatrum Poetarum, nor in Johnson’s Lives. He is in neither of Southey’s collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in The Golden Treasury, but a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent Specimens of 1811 furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the Best and Most Accomplished Couple apologizing for “their too much quaintness and conceit”; and in Willmott’s Sacred Poets Vaughan occupies four pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr. George Macdonald’s England’s Antiphon, and in Archbishop Trench’s Household Book. Ward’s English Poets, in the second volume, has a conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and Whipple’s Family Library of British Poetry. There is a goodly list entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s Less-Known British Poets, all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics again adorn the splendid Treasury of Sacred Song. Vaughan’s secular numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his Seventeenth Century Lyrics, has a small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave, having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial honor in the eleventh volume of Y Cymmrodor. In Emerson’s Parnassus he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry Vaughan,” in A Certain Condescension in Foreigners.
[33] In one of his prefaces, Vaughan hits neatly at the crowd of Herbertists: “These aim more at verse than at perfection.” Where there are noble resemblances, it is well to remember that two sides have the right to be heard. Mrs. Thoreau used to say: “Mr. Emerson imitates Henry!” And she was at least as accurate as the critics who annoyed her old age by the reversed statement.
[34] Mr. R. H. Stoddard owns a copy of the first edition of Nieremberg’s Meditations, translated by Vaughan in 1654, and published the following year, which has upon the title-page an autographic “J. M.” supposed, by every evidence, to be Milton’s. If it be so, the busy Latin Secretary, meditating his grand work, must have been, on his part, a reader and a lover of the man who was almost his equal at golden phrases.
[35] Congreve and Waller employ the same rather too obvious love-name for their serenaded divinities.
[36] Vaughan openly wears jewels which belong to Jonson.
“Go seek thy peace in war: