And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv'n by the spheres

LIKE A VAST SHADOW MOV'D".

What a spacious and sovran soul must have been behind the eyes that 'saw' that Ring and that Shadow! What breadth to take them in! What calm to hold the vision! Then what audacious simpleness of speech in the telling of it, as what he had seen "the other night."-Eternity SEEN and Time! It were not difficult to turn to kindredly grand word-embodiments of an unique subjectiveness that found within itself the materials for more lustrous ladder of light by which to climb the skies than was that granted above "the place" to sleeping Jacob: but the Reader will'search' for himself if he be worthy of possessing these books. I ask him to be alert in marking with what realism Vaughan delineates thoughts that are rare as feelings and feelings that vanish to common mortals if attempted to be languaged. Here also I venture to suggest that in DANIEL GABRIEL ROSSETTI alone of living Poets, as in SHELLEY of the dead, have we any approach to this faculty of making what ordinarily is purely subjective and incommunicable, objective. A few bits from probably the second most enduring gift to our generation (the first being The Ring and The Book)

"Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti " will probably win consent to our suggestion. I turn to "The Blessed Damozel" and read thus-the italics being

ours

It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun ;

So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun.

From the fixed place of Heaven she saw

Time like a pulse shake fierce

Through all the Worlds: Her gaze still strove

Within the gulf to pierce

Its path; and now she spoke as when

The stars sang in their spheres.

And this from "The Portrait":

་་

"Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears

The beating heart of Love's own breast,

Where round the secret of all spheres

All angels lay their wings to rest,-
How shall my soul stand rapt and awed,
When, by the new birth borne abroad
Throughout the music of the suns,
It enters in her soul at once

And knows the silence there for God.
Here with her face doth Memory sit

Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline."

Then is not the 11th Sonnet of the marvellous "House of Life" at once an illustration of the twin-brothers, Thomas and Henry, and in its close a subtle distiliation of "The Retreate"?

"O born with me somewhere that men forget, And though in years of sight and sound unmet, Known for my soul's birth-partner well enough.”

Even to minor things in Vaughan, I am compelled to think Mr. Rossetti (if Mr. don't be as vulgar as Mr. Milton even now) must have read and re-read the Silurist. Every one knows with what dainty phrase Vaughan over and over designates the Holy Ghost by His symbol of the Dove, as thus:

"The Dove's spotless nest

Where souls are hatch'd unto Eternitie."2

and

and

"When I went quite astray,

Out of meer love,

By His mild Dove,

Did shew me home, and put me in the way".

and

-rural shades are the sweet sense

Of piety and innocence :

They are the meek's calm region, where
Angels descend, and rule the sphere;
Where heaven lies leiguer, and the Dove
Duely as dew comes from above".?

"Then if to blood we must resist,

Let Thy mild Dove, and our High-Priest ".'

and often elsewhere, as in Herbert and Crashaw.

Well! Here in "The Blessed

again, we have this :

"We two will lie i' the shadow of

That living, mystic tree

Damozel "

Within whose secret growth the Dove

Is sometimes felt to be,

While every leaf that His plumes touch

Saith His Name audibly ".

1 Ibid p 142.

• Page 5.

VOL. II.

2 Ibid pp 303-4.

3 Ibid p 323.

f

So too in "Dante at Verona" this line,

"nor all content

With lewdness swathed in sentiment ".'

is just the Silurist's "Lust in the robes of Love". Even to Vaughan's puzzling use of 'line' we have him echoed in Mr. Rossetti e. g. in "The Stream's Secret'

"Its eyes invisible

Watch till the sun dial's thin-thrown shade
Be born,-yea, till the journeying line be laid
Upon the point that wakes the spell,
And there in lovelier light than tongue can tell
Its presence stand array'd",3

It were the extreme of folly to imagine for an instant larceny in the case of Mr. Rossetti of the kind of CAMPBELL-who, stealing from the SILURIST'S "Rainbow" and spoiling in the theft as DR. JOHN BROWN has remarked, by omitting the word 'youthful', had nothing but abuse for the Poet-but I delight to recognize in his "Poems" the influence of VAUGHAN and to find Vaughan's supremest gift of uttering the subjec

1 Page 95.

2 Vol. I. p 116.

3 Page 162 and see additional Notes and Illustrations at close of Vol. IVth.