"Fresher than morning-flowers which shew

As thou in tears dost, best in dew."

EMERSON at his best might have written this:

"Awake! awake! heark how th' wood rings,
Winds whisper, and the busie springs
A consort make ;

Awake! awake!

Man is their high-priest, and should rise

To offer up the sacrifice.

I would I were some bird, or star
Flutt'ring in woods, or lifted far

Above this inne

And rode of sin!

Then either star or bird should be
Shining, or singing still, to Thee."2

and this, in a noble poem "Joy":

"He weighs not your forc'd accents, who can have A lesson plaid him by a winde or wave."

It will be allowed I think that HENRY VAUGHAN

did indeed love "to peep and peer as he himself sings, into those phenomena of external Nature that Wordsworth deemed shut to his age, that he at least had all open and I assume it needeth not that

1 Vol. I., p. 230.
Vol. I., p. 199.

2 Vol. I., pp. 107-8.

I dwell further on his seeingness' save that his secular Poems have the same characteristics, with occasional touches of an audacious grandeur, such as belong to his sacred poems at his deepest. Take this photograph of an eagle, worthy to be placed beside William Blake's "Tiger":

"I know not, when into thee I would prie
Which to admire, thy wing first, or thine eye;
Or whether Nature at thy birth design'd

' I observe in passing that true poet as was MICHAEL DRAYTON his discernment of external Nature was dim. How poor his descriptions of the Usk and other rivers beside the Vaughans! Then CHURCHYARD'S references to the Oske' are helpless, and his frank admission that he never had troubled himself to climb the Brecon hills noteworthy, as thus:

"Near Brecknoke towne, there is a mountain hye,
Which shewes so huge, it is full hard to clime :
The mountaine seemes so monstrous to the eye,
That thousands doe repayre to that sometime.
And they that stand right on the top shal see
A wonder great, as people do report:
Which common brute and saying true may bee,
But since in deede, I did not there resort,

I write no more, then world will witnesse well:

Let them that please, of those straunge wonders tell."

(From Wood's Principal Rivers of Wales Illustrated. 2 Vols., 4to., 1803).

More of her fire for thee, or of her wind.

When thou in the clear heights and upmost air

Dost face the sun and his disperséd hair.

.

Resolv'd he is a nobler course to try

And measures out his voyage with his eye.

Then with such furie he begins his flight,

As if his wings contended with his sight.
Leaving the moon, whose humble light doth trade
With spotts, and deals most in the dark and shade:
To the Day's royal planet he doth pass
With daring eyes, and makes the sun his glass.
Here doth he plume and dress himself, the beams
Rushing upon him, like so many streams:

While with direct looks, he doth entertain

The thronging flames, and shoots them back again.1

The poem of "The Eagle" is strangely unequal and exaggerate: but we must search many contemporary volumes ere we shall come on such a superb portraiture of the imperial bird. What felicity of choice in 'direct' where it is. Again the "Charnel-House" is "The Grave" of ROBERT BLAIR purged and concentrated. Bold, deep, almost awesome, it is the most SHAKESPEREAN of the Silurist's productions, that is, in single lines and epithets. Similar are "In Amicum Fonera

1 Vol. II. pp. 202-4.]

2 Vol. II. pp, 75-8.

2

torem" and with scintillations of a grim humour "To his friendThere are things of beauty too in his secular Poetry, as the epithalamium-address "To the best, and most accomplish'd couple "3 and soft as whitest tears ever shed, the "Epitaph upon the Lady Elizabeth, second daughter to his late Majestie ". There are no doubt juvenile and inferior pieces in the Poems of 1646, and in "Olor Iscanus" and "Thalia Rediviva" and a mixture as of the field-poppy with the golden grain but after all deductions there is a substantive residue of measureless worth, making it a scandal and an enigma that no one until now should have brought together such Poetry.

(c) HIS RELATION TO GEORGE HERBERT. Comparisons have been instituted between Vaughan and GEORGE HERBERT of the most uncritical and baseless kind. I must frankly avow that it is a wonder to me how a mind of the insight and acumen of DR. GEORGE MACDONALD in " Antiphon " - where he has written so many wise and beautiful things about him-came to adjudge the Poet of "The Temple " a higher place qua Poet

1 Vol. II. pp 78-80.
3 Vol. II. pp. 105-6.

2 Vol. II. pp. 80-3. 4 Vol. II. pp. 115-7.

:

than the Silurist. With all my reverence and love for critic and subject, I must regard the verdict as a freak of judgment resting on some early (tacit) association. It is the very fantastique of criticism, as I take it, either in substance or workmanship to exalt good George Herbert above either Vaughan or RICHARD CRASHAW. His was a lovely soul, and in his verse there is the very spicery of a sweet, gentle, innocent piety but after all it is fragrance rather than form, flower-scent not flower-beauty. I do not find in all GEORGE HERBERT has written one scintillation of that interblending of Imagination. and Fact that stamps a man as a Maker: his foot never crossed that spirit-region wherein Fancy (in its deepest sense) sculptures her grand conceptions and whence there come from the very blows of the worker, bursts of music. So that I must regard the Silurist's generous praise of Herbert as true to his feeling but untrue and misleading to his genius. It is the mere tradition of criticism to class Silex Scintillans with "The Temple." From the inevitableness of common themes and common experience and common beliefs, there are occasional reminiscences of the latter in the former but with these slight exceptions, HENRY VAUGHAN indubitably is a Poet of an incompar