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HENRY VAUGHAN.

VAUGHAN was born in Wales, on the banks of the Uske, in Brecknockshire, in 1621. His father was a gentleman, but, we presume, poor, as his son was bred to a profession. Young Vaughan became first a lawyer, and then a physician; and we suppose, had it not been for his advanced life, he would have become latterly a clergyman, since he grew, when old, exceedingly devout. In life, he was not fortunate, and we find him, like Chamberlayne, complaining bitterly of the poverty of the poetical tribe. In 1651, he published a volume of verse, in which nascent excellence struggles with dim obscurities, like a young moon with heavy clouds. But his 'Silex Scintillans,' or Sacred Poems,' produced in later life, attests at once the depth of his devotion, and the truth and originality of his genius. He died in 1695.

Campbell, always prone to be rather severe on pious poets, and whose taste, too, was finical at times, says of Vaughan'He is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit; but he has some few scattered thoughts that meet the eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath.' Surely this is rather 'harsh' judgment. At the same time, it is not a little laughable to find that Campbell has himself appropriated one of these 'wild flowers.' In his beautiful 'Rainbow,' he cries

'How came the world's gray fathers forth
To mark thy sacred sign!'

Vaughan had said

'How bright wert thou when Shem's admiring eye,
Thy burnished, flaming arch did first descry;
When Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,
The youthful world's gray fathers in one knot,

Did with intentive looks watch every hour
For thy new light, and trembled at each shower!'

Indeed, all Campbell's 'Rainbow' is just a reflection of Vaughan's, and reminds you of those faint, pale shadows of the heavenly bow you sometimes see in the dark

d disarranged skies of

spring. To steal from, and then strike down the victim, is more suitable to robbers than to poets.

Perhaps the best criticism on Vaughan may be found in the title of his own poems, Silex Scintillans.' He had a good deal of the dulness and hardness of the flint about his mind, but the influence of poverty and suffering,-for true it is that

'Wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong;

They learn in suffering what they teach in song,'

and latterly the power of a genuine, though somewhat narrow piety, struck out glorious scintillations from the bare but rich rock. He ranks with Crashaw, Quarles, and Herbert, as one of the best of our early religious poets; like them in their faults, and superior to all of them in refinement and beauty, if not in strength of genius.

ON A CHARNEL-HOUSE.

Where are you, shoreless thoughts, vast-tentered1 hope,
Ambitious dreams, aims of an endless scope,

Whose stretched excess runs on a string too high,
And on the rack of self-extension die?
Chameleons of state, air-mongering2 band,

Whose breath, like gunpowder, blows up a land,
Come, see your dissolution, and weigh
What a loathed nothing you shall be one day.
As the elements by circulation pass

From one to the other, and that which first was
Is so again, so 'tis with you. The grave
And nature but complete: what the one gave,
The other takes. Think, then, that in this bed
There sleep the relics of as proud a head,
As stern and subtle as your own; that hath
Performed or forced as much; whose tempest-wrath
Hath levelled kings with slaves; and wisely, then,

1 'Vast-tentered:' extended.-Air-mongering:' dealing in air or unsubstan tial visions.

Calm these high furies, and descend to men.
Thus Cyrus tamed the Macedon; a tomb

Checked him who thought the world too strait a room.
Have I obeyed the powers of a face,

A beauty, able to undo the race

Of easy man? I look but here, and straight

I am informed; the lovely counterfeit

Was but a smoother clay. That famished slave,
Beggared by wealth, who starves that he may save,
Brings hither but his sheet. Nay, the ostrich-man,
That feeds on steel and bullet, he that can
Outswear his lordship, and reply as tough
To a kind word, as if his tongue were buff,
Is chapfallen here: worms, without wit or fear,
Defy him now; death has disarmed the bear.
Thus could I run o'er all the piteous score
Of erring men, and having done, meet more.
Their shuffled wills, abortive, vain intents,
Fantastic humours, perilous ascents,
False, empty honours, traitorous delights,
And whatsoe'er a blind conceit invites,-

But these, and more, which the weak vermins swell,
Are couched in this accumulative cell,

Which I could scatter; but the grudging sun

Calls home his beams, and warns me to be gone:

Day leaves me in a double night, and I

Must bid farewell to my sad library,

Yet with these notes. Henceforth with thought of thee

I'll season all succeeding jollity,

Yet damn not mirth, nor think too much is fit:

Excess hath no religion, nor wit;

But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain,
One check from thee shall channel it again.

ON GOMBAULD'S ENDYMION.

I've read thy soul's fair night-piece, and have seen
The amours and courtship of the silent queen;
Her stolen descents to earth, and what did move her
To juggle first with heaven, then with a lover;
With Latmos' louder rescue, and, alas!

To find her out, a hue and cry in brass;
Thy journal of deep mysteries, and sad
Nocturnal pilgrimage; with thy dreams, clad
In fancies darker than thy cave; thy glass
Of sleepy draughts; and as thy soul did pass
In her calm voyage, what discourse she heard
Of spirits; what dark groves and ill-shaped guard
Ismena led thee through; with thy proud flight
O'er Periardes, and deep-musing night

Near fair Eurotas' banks; what solemn green

The neighbour shades wear; and what forms are seen
In their large bowers; with that sad path and seat
Which none but light-heeled nymphs and fairies beat,
Their solitary life, and how exempt

From common frailty, the severe contempt
They have of man, their privilege to live
A tree or fountain, and in that reprieve
What ages they consume: with the sad vale
Of Diophania; and the mournful tale

Of the bleeding, vocal myrtle:-these and more,
Thy richer thoughts, we are upon the score
To thy rare fancy for. Nor dost thou fall
From thy first majesty, or ought at all
Betray consumption. Thy full vigorous bays
Wear the same green, and scorn the lean decays
Of style or matter; just as I have known
Some crystal spring, that from the neighbour down

Derived her birth, in gentle murmurs steal
To the next vale, and proudly there reveal
Her streams in louder accents, adding still
More noise and waters to her channel, till
At last, swollen with increase, she glides along
The lawns and meadows, in a wanton throng
Of frothy billows, and in one great name
Swallows the tributary brooks' drowned fame.
Nor are they mere inventions, for we
In the same piece find scattered philosophy,
And hidden, dispersed truths, that folded lie
In the dark shades of deep allegory,
So neatly weaved, like arras, they descry
Fables with truth, fancy with history.
So that thou hast, in this thy curious mould,
Cast that commended mixture wished of old,
Which shall these contemplations render far
Less mutable, and lasting as their star;
And while there is a people, or a sun,
Endymion's story with the moon shall run.

APOSTROPHE TO FLETCHER THE DRAMATIST.

I did believe, great Beaumont being dead,
Thy widowed muse slept on his flowery bed.
But I am richly cozened, and can see
Wit transmigrates-his spirit stayed with thee;
Which, doubly advantaged by thy single pen,
In life and death now treads the stage again.
And thus are we freed from that dearth of wit
Which starved the land, since into schisms split,
Wherein th' hast done so much, we must needs guess
Wit's last edition is now i' the press.

For thou hast drained invention, and he

That writes hereafter, doth but pillage thee.

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