the heart of Nature". Let the Reader turn to Vaughan with this characteristic of his seeingness in alert recollection, and he will be richly rewarded. He will not find mere wordpainting or a bootless effort as in Kent's Fruitpoems to turn the pen into a brush and words into colours, as if the most Chinese-faithful imitation were any approach to the real, or as though the garish reproduction of "The Last Supper" in mosaics were for one minute to be mated with the fading fresco of the Refectory in the Convent of Maria della Grazia.2 But nevertheless he will

1 Antiphon, as before, pp. 261-2.

Take "Fructidor: a reverie in an Orchard" of W. Charles Kent, in 'Dreamland," with other Poems (Longmans) 1862. Here are some of the very best stanzas in it:

The swollen pear, smooth tapering to its stalk,
Droops large and stirless in the generous sun;
The crumbling medlars on the garden wall,
Ray-sodden lumps, fall brownly one by one;
And, pierced by beak of linnet, in a flood,

The darkling damson drips with ruby blood.
All tingling hot the sultry wall o'erspread

By snakelike branches writhed and interlaced,
Sustains the peach, whose cheek of darkened red
Th' enamoured wild-bee's kisses have defaced-
Pink-veined from rugged stone to tender peel,
All faintly powdered with a pearly meal.

find realism that is as worship, long, yearning looks and the very 'body and pressure' put before you, but over it, like to the amethysts and opals and changing purples that suffuse pure skies, a light of the spiritual,

See, pensile, quivering from the jewelled stems
Redundant cherries twinkle moist in air;

·

Indepen

Lo, deep in umbrage that the day contemns, The soft fig blackens in its sylvan lair; Behold in clumps that trail the dingle sod The pebble filbert in its shaggy pod". And so through twenty-four similiar stanzas. dent of the spuriously-realistic fidelity in this poem when you come to look into it, as of ray-sodden' (? rainsodden) and ruby blood' and 'tingling' wall' (impossible where there is'nt life) quivering cherries' (which only bob up and down, never quiver) and so on, this sort of thing whatever it may be is not poetry. Put the pear and medlar and damson and all the rest together in the original or in some cunning fruit-piece of the Painter and you have delicious specimens of the wonder and riches of the Orchard, but not a poem. Neither in such versification-description as of "Fructidor ". There lacks the human touch, the flash of the poetic gift that (so-tosay) imparts moral worth and significance. Vaughan and Wordsworth can't name a flower without illumining it with sentiment, without associating it with some human interest: and there lies genius as distinguished from the knack of rhyme.

"The consecration and the poet's dream,
The light that never was on sea or shore."

You have 'porings' over by the 'hour' of the
simplest things, a 'primrose', a leaf reflected in
the Usk, a star glittering in the depths of azure,
a bird's song or feathers, a stone "so old so old",
a forsaken nest, a hill-side spring, a spot of colour
among the standing corn, the spires of grass emerald
green or pathetically tawny, a hart's-foot fern, the
mountains in shadow and shine, the wonder-land of
the Seasons in their coming and going, or a Water-
fall. Let the Reader turn to the poem of the
"Waterfall" and in our quartos (facing the title-
page of the present Volume), he has the scene
before him over-against which the Silurist often
'sate, to please his pensive eye." His love of
Nature breathes through all his prose-interpreta-
tions of GUEVARA, where are descriptive bits and
epithets and fresh breeziness of open-air thought,
not in the Spaniard.2

As combining various remarkablenesses that belong almost peculiarly to Vaughan in this thing of his seeingness, I invite special and prolonged

1 Vol. I. pp. 283-4.

2 See Vol. III. pp. 229-260, and additional Notes and Illustrations at end of Vol. IV. on GUEVARAS of England.

attention to the "Dawning", with its weirdly magnificent delineation of the "Dawn" and its rich symbolism in union as in "The World", with the most homely and familiar wording, as, "all expect some sudden matter" and of the stream "acquainted elsewhere."

I name, and can only name further, the minuterwrought yet equally seeing poem which I have entitled Hidden "2: and that other, perhaps the grandest of all next to "The World," as " Beyond the Veil" is the loveliest and dearest, namely "The Night". It is no marvel that Dr. Macdonald exclaims "This is glorious; and its lesson of quiet and retirement we need more than ever in these hurried days upon which we have fallen. If men would be still enough in themselves to hear, through all the noises of the busy light, the voice that is ever talking on in the dusky chambers of their hearts! Look at his love for Nature, too...... I think this poem grander than any of George Herbert's. I use the word with intended precision."

6

We may now look at some vignettes (so-tosay), as this of Rules and Lessons":

Morning" in

1 Vol. I. pp. 124-6,

2 Vol. I. pp. 171-4.

3 Vol. I. pp. 256-9.

Antiphon, as before, pp. 259-60.

"Never sleep the sun up. Dawn with the day. 'Twixt heaven, and us.

Prayer shou'd
There are set, awful hours
The mana was not good

After sun-rising; fair-day sullies flowres.

Rise to prevent the sun; sleep doth sins glut, And heaven's gate opens when this world's is shut. Walk with thy fellow-creatures: note the hush And whispers amongst them. There's not a spring Or leafe but hath his morning-hymn. Each bush And oak doth know I AM. Canst thou not sing? O leave thy cares, and follies! go this way, And thou art sure to prosper all the day.'

And this vivid Landscape:

"How rich, O Lord, how fresh Thy visits are!
'Twas but just now my bleak leaves hopeless hung

Sullyed with dust and mud;

Each snarling blast shot through me, and did sheare Their youth and beauty; cold showres nipt and wrung

Their spiciness and bloud;

But since Thou didst in one sweet glance survey
Their sad decays, I flourish, and once more

Breathe all perfumes, and spice;

I smell a dew like myrrh, and all the day
Weare in my bosome a full sun : such store
Hath one beame from Thy eys."2

Here is a portrait of the weeping Mary:

1 Vol. I., p. 96. 2 Vol. I, p. 106.