and

A state that with the sun doth set,

And comes next morning fresh as he ".'

Did spit on Thee, and smote Thee too;

Crown'd Thee with thorns, and bow'd the knee,

But in contempt, as still we see,

I'le marvel not at ought they do,

Because they us'd My Saviour so;

Since of my Lord they had their will,

The servant must not take it ill."

His sufferings in the royal cause went the length of imprisonment: for he addresses DR. POWELL as his "loyal fellow-prisoner":3 but no farther. That is to say, he does not appear to have personally borne arms. His high-thoughted poems on the death of "R. W" at Rowton Heath and on "C. W." and "R Hall" would seem to indicate that he had been present in some battle-fields and in the shock of combat lost his friends but he distinctly disavows in "Ad Posteros" having shed blood. The Reader will find our translation of the Latin helpful. THOMAS VAUGHAN Went

1 Vol. I. p 227.

2 Ibid p 248.

3 Vol. II. p 197.

The Latin in Vol. I. p 6: the translation Ibid pp

237-8.

probably a degree beyond Henry Vaughan. his Latin poems he hesitates not to compare the execution of Charles I. with the supremest of all deaths, while LAUD has a nimbus of glory placed around his purple' face. "These be thy gods, O Israel ". I don't dwell longer on this sorry matter of our Worthy's royalism. It demanded recognition, statement and handling, as a formative element in his Life and Writings: but perhaps sufficient has been said. So we pass to something better and more satisfying.

(d) INNER LIFE. The Poems of 1646, published when their Author was in his twenty-fifth year, have very much the tone of contemporary verse on the same themes. The queen of his heart under the varying names of "Amoret", "Etesia", and the like, evidently held him in sweet thrall, nor is he reluctant long afterwards to admit that he was "slave" to every "handsome face". Naturally he must have been of an ardent, impetuous, impassioned temperament, sensuous though not sensual, with the thrill and sting in flesh and spirit, that come of surrender to the spell of Woman. Herein he reminds us of PHINEAS FLETCHER in that unsuspected chapter of his life (until we revealed it), wherein the afterwards staid and grave Rector of Hilgay, is presented

wearing his "heart upon his sleeve" if not for "daws to peck at " naked to eye and touch of NICEA and through her to the world. Like the Singer of the "Purple Island" and " Apollyonists " too, HENRY VAUGHAN was arrested in his loveliits and earthly wooings after a co-equally real way. There is not a line, an epithet in the volume of 1646 that needed tear or confession: and yet the Epistle to Silex Scintillans with its in all Literature probably unique supplication that nobody would buy or read the earlier Poems, is penitent even to remorse. The secret of it all lay, as has been shewn, in the premature death of his (first) young wife, and the long-sorrow it brought, accompanied, as his "Silex Scintillans," preface shews, with personal illness of a perilous sort, by which, behind the ordinary movements of his life he was brought face-to-face with Death, and found his sick-chamber darkened into as solemn and awful a place as the old window-less chamber in the Temple, whose light was the flash of the Schechinah-glory and the seven-branched golden candle-stick. There and then, as beneath the vision-Face of his dead and mourned wife was transacted the one potentiality of every human life that recognizes relations to God and eternitythe glad surrender of a hitherto resisting will and

heart and whole nature to the One will, and the great heart of Love of the divinely-human and humanly-divine Redeemer, having been in vain sought so to do by his wife. Admitted that in a deep and grand sense the Light from that supreme Face "lighteth every man that cometh into the world". Yet beyond that outward touching of the light, there must be the definite in-passing and transfiguration of the separate individual in separate audience with and acceptance of Him "the true Light" and that took place with HENRY VAUGHAN, and the poignant light never paled of its splendour to his eye, nor did he ever seek other watchword than the Apostle's: "God Who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of JESUS CHRIST." (2 Corinthians iv., 6). It is not sermonizing this: it is the simple matter-of-fact that gives its own character to every word subsequently written, and no cant of irreligion (worser if possible than the weak cant of well-meaning religion) will cause us to suppress our credence of it. Yet was there resistance even to rebellion, according to the Poet's own account: our account would rather be, after wise deliberateness and intellectual-spiritual weighing', and an ultimate

irremovable decision.

We have the struggle and

the triumph in his 'Emblema', and its interpretation by us will speak to every heart that has 'known' such preter-human contacts and submissions and gladnesses, after sore weeping.'

The Emblem' does not stand alone in its autobiographic revelations. The Reader will do well to turn to "The Call" with its enigmatical date "some twenty years". Then, there are the pricelessly real 'Relapse' and 'Christ's Nativity' and 'Repentance', and the Tempest' and The Pilgrimage' and 'The Sap' and 'Idle Verse': the last such a snatch as might have found a place in some of the great Elizabethan dramas."

So too Affliction "3 with its meek allusions to his sickness and the comfort gotten from the 'rod' as well as the 'staff'-as long ago in the 23rd Psalm the shepherd-singer David sang-as thus:

"Peace! peace! it is not so. Thou doest miscall Thy physick; pils that change

1 I beg the Reader to consult it: Vol. I., pp. 327-8. 2 I give the places of these pieces: The Relapse, Vol. I. pp 91-2: Christ's Nativity, ibid pp 107-9: Repentance ibid pp 118-121: The Tempest ibid pp 139-142: The Pilgrimage, ibid pp 146-7: The Sap, ibid, pp 165-7: Idle Verse, ibid PP

115-6.

Vol. I. p 302.