Part 19 (2/2)

He was twice married, and died in 1695, aged 73, at Newton, on the banks of his beloved Usk, where he had spent his useful, blameless, and, we doubt not, happy life; living from day to day in the eye of Nature, and in his solitary rides and walks in that wild and beautiful country, finding full exercise for that fine sense of the beauty and wondrousness of all visible things, ”the earth and every common sight,” the expression of which he has so worthily embodied in his poems.

In ”The Retreate,” he thus expresses this pa.s.sionate love of Nature-

”Happy those early dayes, when I s.h.i.+n'd in my Angell-infancy!

Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy ought But a white, Celestiall thought; When yet I had not walkt above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short s.p.a.ce, Could see a glimpse of his bright face; When on some gilded Cloud or flowre My gazing soul would dwell an houre, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My Conscience with a sinfule sound, Or had the black art to dispence A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence, But felt through all this fleshly dresse Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.

O how I long to travell back, And tread again that ancient track!

That I might once more reach that plaine, Where first I left my glorious traine; From whence th' Inlightned spirit sees That shady City of Palme trees.”

To use the words of Lord Jeffrey as applied to Shakspeare, Vaughan seems to have had in large measure and of finest quality, ”that indestructible love of flowers, and odors, and dews, and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight, which are the material elements of poetry; and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion which is its essence and its vivifying power.”

And though what Sir Walter says of the country surgeon is too true, that he is worse fed and harder wrought than any one else in the parish, except it be his horse; still, to a man like Vaughan, to whom the love of nature and its scrutiny was a constant pa.s.sion, few occupations could have furnished ampler and more exquisite manifestations of her magnificence and beauty. Many of his finest descriptions give us quite the notion of their having been composed when going his rounds on his Welsh pony among the glens and hills, and their unspeakable solitudes.

Such lines as the following to a Star were probably direct from nature on some cloudless night:-

”Whatever 'tis, whose beauty here below Attracts thee thus, and makes thee stream and flow, And winde and curle, and wink and smile, s.h.i.+fting thy gate and guile.”

He is one of the earliest of our poets who treats external nature subjectively rather than objectively, in which he was followed by Gray (especially in his letters) and Collins and Cowper, and in some measure by Warton, until it reached its consummation, and perhaps its excess, in Wordsworth.

We shall now give our readers some specimens from the reprint of the _Silex_ by Mr. Pickering, so admirably edited by the Rev. H. F. Lyte, himself a true poet, of whose careful life of our author we have made very free use.

THE TIMBER.

”Sure thou didst flourish once! and many Springs, Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers Past o'er thy head: many light Hearts and Wings, Which now are dead, lodg'd in thy living bowers.

”And still a new succession sings and flies; Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot Towards the old and still enduring skies; While the low Violet thriveth at their root.

”But thou beneath the sad and heavy Line Of death dost waste all senseless, cold and dark; Where not so much as dreams of light may s.h.i.+ne, Nor any thought of greenness, leaf or bark.

”And yet, as if some deep hate and dissent, Bred in thy growth betwixt high winds and thee, Were still alive, thou dost great storms resent, Before they come, and know'st how near they be.

”Else all at rest thou lyest, and the fierce breath Of tempests can no more disturb thy ease; But this thy strange resentment after death Means only those who broke in life thy peace.”

This poem is founded upon the superst.i.tion that a tree which had been blown down by the wind gave signs of restlessness and anger before the coming of a storm from the quarter whence came its own fall. It seems to us full of the finest fantasy and expression.

THE WORLD.

”I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driv'n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov'd, in which the world And all her train were hurl'd.”

There is a wonderful magnificence about this; and what a Bunyan-like reality is given to the vision by ”_the other night_”!

MAN.

”Weighing the stedfastness and state Of some mean things which here below reside, Where birds like watchful Clocks the noiseless date And Intercourse of times divide, Where Bees at night get home and hive, and flowrs, Early as well as late, Rise with the Sun, and set in the same bowrs:

”I would, said I, my G.o.d would give The staidness of these things to man! for these To His divine appointments ever cleave, And no new business breaks their peace; The birds nor sow nor reap, yet sup and dine, The flowres without clothes live, Yet Solomon was never drest so fine.

”Man hath still either toyes or Care; He hath no root, nor to one place is ty'd, But ever restless and Irregular About this Earth doth run and ride.

He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where; He says it is so far, That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

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