Henry Vaughan was born in Llansaintfread, Brecknockshire, Wales in 1621. He was educated at Oxford, where he suffered a short imprisonment for his too zealous loyalty to the royal cause, left without taking a degree, studied medicine in London, and passed the remainder of his life in his native parish. He published four volumes of poetry: a translation of the tenth satire of Juvenal, with original amatory pieces, 1646; Silex Scintillans, 1650; Olor Iscanus (Swan of the Usk), 1651; and Thalia Redivivus, the Pastimes and Diversions of a Country Muse, 1678;and two of prose: The Mount of Olives, 1652; and Flores Solitudinis, 1678. All of these, except the first, were devotional. From his living in the country of the ancient Silures, Vaughan was called the Silurist. He died on the 23d of April, 1695.
Personal
There are two Vaughans, twinnes, both very ingeniose and writers. One writt a poeme called Olor Iscanus (Henry Vaughan, the first-borne), and another booke of Divine Meditations. His brother wrote severall treatises, whose names I have now forgott, but names himself Eugenius Philalethes.
Henry Vaughan, Silurist:you know Silures contayned Breconockshire, Herefordshire, etc.
Henry Vaughan, called the Silurist from that part of Wales whose inhabitants were in ancient times called Silures, brother twin (but elder) to Eugenius Philalethes, alias Tho. Vaughan was born at Newton S. Briget, lying on the river Isca, commonly called Uske in Brecknockshire, educated in grammar learning in his own country for six years under one Matthew Herbert a noted schoolmaster of his time, made his first entry into Jesus College in Mich. term 1638, aged 17 years: where spending two years or more in logicals under a noted tutor, was taken thence and designed by his father for the obtaining of some knowledge in the municipal laws at London. But soon after the civil war beginning, to the horror of all good men, he was sent for home, followed the pleasant paths of poetry and philology, became noted for his ingenuity, and published several specimens thereof, of which his Olor Iscanus was most valued. Afterwards applying his mind to the study of physic, became at length eminent in his own country for the practice thereof, and was esteemed by scholars an ingenious person, but proud and humorous . He died in the latter end of April (about the 29th day) in sixteen hundred ninety and five, and was buried in the parish church of Llansenfreid about two miles distant from Brecknock in Brecknockshire.
If ever Poet had a poets birth-place it was the Silurist . One marvels how William and Mary Howitt missed such a shrine for their Homes and Haunts. Dates are sorrowfully lacking: but having either in London or Edinburgh, or in some continental University taken his diploma of Doctor of Medicinesearch and research far and wide, in which I have been generously aided, have failed to come on his name anywherehe began his practice in the town of Brecon . Such is the imperfect Story of the outer Life of Henry Vaughan. None can mourn our scanty materials more than ourselves, fuller though they be relatively to our precursors. Yet we have done our fruitless best to get more.
Constrained by promptings of thy ancient race, | |
Thy gown and books thou flungst away, | |
To meet the sturdy Roundhead face to face | |
On many a hard-fought day, | |
Till thy soft soul grew sick, and thou didst turn | |
To our old hills; and there, ere long, | |
Love for thy Amoret, at times, would burn | |
In some too fervid song. | |
But soon thy wilder pulses stayed, and, life | |
Grown equable, thy sweet muse mild, | |
Sobered by tranquil love of child and wife, | |
Flowed pure and undefiled. | |
A humble healer thro a life obscure, | |
Thou didst expend thy homely days; | |
Sweet Swan of Usk! few know how clear and pure | |
Are thy unheeded lays. | |
One poet shall become a household name | |
Into the nations heart ingrown; | |
One more than equal miss the meed of fame, | |
And live and die unknown. |
He was an affectionate husband and father, by all inference and indication. He was twice married, but we only know that there were two sons and three daughters by the first marriage, and one daughter by the second. No names are left; but the youngest daughter married John Turberville, and her grand-daughter died single in 1780, aged ninety-two. Otherwise the family of Henry Vaughan has been as modest and retiring as himself . On his tomb, as though he were indeed the pioneer of other poets, journeying palmerwise, humbly and prayerfully to lead them and their singing upward through night to light, was cut this motto:
SERVUS INUTILIS, | |
PECCATOR MAXIMUS, | |
HIC JACEO. | |
Gloria! + Miserere! |
Where growes the flower of peace, | |
The rose that cannot wither, |
More and more in love with day. |
In his own person, Henry Vaughan left no trace in society. His life seemed to slip by like the running water on which he was forever gazing and moralizing, and his memory met early with the fate which he hardly foresaw. Descended from the royal chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus mentions, and whose abode, in the day of Roman domination, was in the district called Siluria, he called himself the Silurist upon his title-pages; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of epitaphs, close by his home in the glorious valley of the Usk and the little Honddu, under the shadow of Tretower, the ruined castle of his race, and of Pen-y-Fan and his kindred peaks.
General
Silex Scintillans: | or | Sacred Poems | and | Private Eiaculations | by | Henry Vaughan Silurist. | London: Printed by T. W. for H. Blunden | at ye Castle in Cornehill, 1650.
The God of the spirits of all flesh hath granted me a further use of mine than I did look for in the body; and when I expected, and had by His assistance prepared for a message of death, then did he answer me with life; I hope to His glory and my great advantage, that I may flourish not with leaf only, but with some fruit also; which hope and earnest desire of His poor creature, I humbly beseech Him to perfect and fulfil for His dear Sons sake, unto Whom, with Him and the most holy and loving Spirit, be ascribed by angels, by men, and by all His works, all glory, and wisdom, and dominion, in this the temporal and in the eternal being. Amen.
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 our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath.
This little volume has long lain hid in undeserved oblivion. Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, as he loved to be called, appears to have been a very accomplished individual, though given, as we learn from Anthony Wood, to be singular and humoursome. He has not, indeed, scaled the highest heaven of invention, nor even succeeded in bestowing fame and celebrity on his favourite river of Isca; but if a considerable command of forcible language, and an occasional richness of imagery, be sufficient to arrest a poet fast falling into total oblivion, we think we shall be justified in selecting the Olor Iscanus as the subject of an article. This little production is moreover peculiarly adapted to our purposes. We could not recommend a reprint of the whole, though the poetry only runs to sixty-four small octavo pages, for there are many parts in which the author falls into dulness or obscurity, or where, following the cold and vapid taste of the times, he spends his strength on frigid and bombastic conceits; but, at the same time, Vaughan possessed both feeling and imagination,flowers which not unfrequently shew themselves above the weeds which the warped judgment of the age encouraged to grow up in too great luxuriance. Added to this, he is a translator of no little skill; and has succeeded in turning many of the metrical pieces of Boëtius, and some of the odes of Casimir, into free and forcible English. It is very much to be lamented, that he did not give more of his attention to this good service.
His poems display much originality of thought, and frequently likewise much felicity of expression. The former is, indeed, at times condensed into obscurity, and the latter defaced with quaintness. But Vaughan never degenerates into a smooth versifier of commonplaces. One, indeed, of his great faults as a poet, is the attempt to crowd too much of matter into his sentences, so that they read roughly and inharmoniously, the words almost elbowing each other out of the lines. His rhymes, too, are frequently defective; and he delights in making the sense of one line run over into the line following . His faults are in a great measure those of the age he lived in, and the matter he imitated, while his beauties are all his own . Among those who can prize poetic thought, even when clad in a dress somewhat quaint and antiquated, who love to commune with a heart overflowing with religious ardour, and who do not value this the less because it has been lighted at the earlier and purer fires of Christianity, and has caught a portion of their youthful glow, poems like those of Henry Vaughans will not want their readers, nor will such readers be unthankful to have our author and his works introduced to their acquaintance.
He is very often dull and obscure, and spends his strength on frigid and bombastic conceits; but occasionally, and especially in his sacred poems, he exhibits considerable originality and picturesque grace, and breathes forth a high strain of morality and piety.
We have said little about the deep godliness, the spiritual Christianity, with which every poem is penetrated and quickened. Those who can detect and relish this best, will not be the worst pleased at our saying little about it. Vaughans religion is deep, lively, personal, tender, kindly, impassioned, temperate; it sits i the centre. His religion grows up, effloresces into the ideas and forms of poetry as naturally, as noiselessly, as beautifully as the life of the unseen seed finds its way up into the bright consummate flower.
Let every one who is well-acquainted with Wordsworths grand odethat on the Intimations of Immortalityturn his mind to a comparison between that and this: he will find the resemblance remarkable. Whether The Retreat suggested the form of the Ode is not of much consequence, for the Ode is the outcome at once and essence of all Wordsworths theories; and whatever he may have drawn from The Retreat is glorified in the Ode. Vaughans poem is the more definite of the two, and gives us in its close, poor as that is compared with the rest of it, just what we feel is wanting in Wordsworthsthe hope of return to the bliss of childhood.
I thought of dear Henry Vaughan.
I have another reason for presenting The Retreate, that will appear immediately: but apart from that and inevitable memories of Wordsworth, surely we have there some very remarkable scrutiny and interrogation of subtleties of our deepest spiritual being, such as were not frequent two hundred and fifty years ago or thereby. I ask the Reader to mark the intense yearning and feeling away back to child-time in the poem: the resolute and almost awesome getting back again in maturity, thinkings and feelings and instinct-aspirations long vanished, as of a lost tune returning in a dream. I dont know that anywhere in our elder Literature (out of Hamlet with which comparison were simply idle) you can put your finger on finer utterance of what most would have found un-utterable or utterable alone by music.
He is in various respects diverse from Herbert, and in some even superior to him: he has a larger range, and, in point of thought and of perception, a certain subtlety mingled with intensity which brings him into specially close relation to the modern tone in poetry . Of course a volume of Humorous Poetry is not the place where the deservings of Vaughan can be shown forth in any sufficient measure.
As a sacred poet, Vaughan has an intensity of feeling only inferior to Crashaw.
It would, indeed, be difficult to find a true and lofty singer who has been so seriously underrated as Vaughan. It is his gloryas it has been his literary shamethat his entire works are purely and consistently devout. He dared, among Cavaliers and as a Cavalier, to borrow the verse of Herrick, in which to praise the God of the Commonwealth. Hence it has needed the long purgation of these centuries, to eliminate passion and prejudice from the sentence which we can now safely pronounce, upon his contemporaries and himself. Old Longinus said, that he called that alone poetry which permanently pleased and was suitable to any age. By this severest of tests Henry Vaughan is at last vindicated and held in honor.
A physician living in his native Wales and calling himself The Silurist. He is remembered under that name yet with peculiar regard by lovers of rare old English poetry, and was esteemed an ingenious person, but proud and humorous.
Vaughan only began to be a poet when Crashaws career was over; and he did not continue to be a poet to any purpose long. Everything he wrote before or after the two parts of Silex Scintillans might be spared. He is a mystic, as Herbert is an ascetic and Crashaw a devotee. Herberts temptation is the world, Vaughans temptation is the flesh; the special service that Herbert does him is to lift his mind from profane love to sacred. He is quite pathetic in the preface to Silex Scintillans about his early loose love-poetry. He suppressed the worst of it, and adjures his reader to leave the sufficiently harmless collection which escaped him unread . The sanctity and insight of childhood are more to him than even to Wordsworth . In his own translations Henry Vaughan uses Neoplatonists quite as familiarly as Jesuits. His prose is rich and musical; his few Latin poems mostly insignificant, more pointless than Herberts and quite without the airy grace of Crashaws Bubble, of which Mr. Grosart has made a very pretty English poem. His translations from Ovid and Juvenal are rough and cumbrous; he writes decasyllabics very badly compared not only with Sandys but with Crashaw, whose description of a Religious House contains one line, Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep, worthy of Pope. His translations in octosyllabics from Casimir and Boethius are excellent, especially the poem on the Golden Age from Boethius.
Henry Vaughans sacred verse, although, like Herberts, disfigured with the conceits of his time, is yet eminently spiritual, and replete with rare beauty, both of thought and expression.
Among the greatest of childhoods poets.
Like Herbert, and in pretty obvious imitation of him, he set himself to bend the prevailing fancy for quips and quaintnesses into sacred uses, to see that the Devil should not have all the best conceits. But he is not so uniformly successful, though he has greater depth and greater originality of thought.
Eternity has been known to spoil a poet for time, but not in this instance. Never did religion and art interchange a more fortunate service, outside Italian studios. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions, Vaughans voice grew at once freer and more forceful. In him a marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual readjustment, even as it did, three centuries later, in one greater than he, John Henry Newman . Vaughan has very little quaintness, as we now understand that word, and none of the cloudiness and incorrigible grotesqueness which dominated his Alexandrian day. He has great temperance; he keeps his eye upon the end, and scarcely falls at all into the fond adulteries of art, inversions, unscholarly compound words, or hard-driven metaphors. If he be difficult to follow, it is only because he lives, as it were, in highly oxygenated air; he is remote and peculiar, but not eccentric.
In Vaughan we also find a sense of the lessons Nature has for man, the harmony of the visible world with the invisible,not only in its details, but in its larger, its cosmic aspects, what he styles the great chime and symphony of Nature.such as hardly reappear before we reach Wordsworth. Yet Vaughan, whose special aim that of rendering religious sentiment, restricted his landscape, and whose language is often obscure or fanciful, we must confess cannot compare with the largeness, the exquisite refinement, of the later poet.
One must not, however, exaggerate the extent of Herberts influence. When we have allowed that Vaughan owed to him his religious life, and so the practice of religious poetry, that he followed him in the employment of certain metres and in the treatment of certain topics, that he was content to adopt certain of his tropes and phrases, and to vie with him in the manufacture of curious conceits, we have perhaps stated the case not unfairly. But there was a radical diversity in the nature of the two men that could not but find expression in their poetry. As Mr. Simcox justly phrases it, Herbert was an ascetic, Vaughan a mystic. And it is undoubtedly the mystical element in Vaughans writing by which he takes rank as a poet. He may occasionally out-Herbert Herbert in metaphors and emblems, but in spite of them, and even through them, it is easy to see that he has a passion for Nature for her own sake; that he has observed her moods; that indeed the world is to him no less than a veil of the Eternal Spirit, whose presence may be felt in any, even the smallest, part. Such a temper, notwithstanding occasional aberration, is poles apart from one which merely ransacks phenomena for quaint similitudes . Indeed, if truth must be told, Vaughan is very much the poet of fine lines and stanzas, of imaginative intervals . If still more truth must be told (pace Dr. Grosart), it must be allowed that there are far too large a number of the religious poems entirely unrelieved by any spark; and some for which there is no epithet but banal.
Unequal as a whole, love nature dearly, and leap sometimes into a higher air of poetry than Herbert could attain.
Vaughans verse is highly remarkable and originalthat of a genius manqué but rising to gleams of inspiration. In form he is careless and unequal, but his lyric is meditative, fresh, and highly subjective, the deep and pregnant reflection of a life and experience of much sorrow. In feeling and in phrase he is often strangely modern.
Henry Vaughan was an Anglican mystic . Delicate, meditative, usually a little humdrum, but every now and then flashing out for a line or two into radiant intuitions admirably worded. In both there is much obscurity to be deplored; but while we cultivate Crashaw for the flame below the smoke, we wait in Vaughan for the light within the cloud.
Vaughan knew neither himself nor his fellow-men as Herbert knew them, and the shrewd counsels of the author of The Temple often become in the poetry of his disciple mere querulous platitudes. In two respects, however, Vaughan shows the clearer insight. He has a keener eye for the teaching of nature, and a deeper sense of the mystery of childhood. In several of his poems on children may be found the germ of that idea which Wordsworth developed in his Ode to Immortality, indeed some admirers of Vaughan have claimed for The Retreat the actual parentage of the ode.
Vaughans position among English poets is not only high, but in some respects unique. The pervading atmosphere of mystic rapture, rather than isolated fine things, constitute the main charm of his poems; yet two, The Retreat and They are all gone into the world of light, rank among the finest in the language, and, except the poems on scripture history and church festivals, there is scarcely one without some memorable thought or expression, though frequently kindling, to use his own simile, like unanticipated sparks from a flinty ground. He not unfrequently lapses into absurdity, misled by the affectation of wit and ingenuity which beset the poetry of his time; but his taste is on the whole better than Herberts, and much better than Crashaws . Herbert is devout according to recognised methods, Vaughan is a devout mystic. Herbert visits the spiritual world as a pious pilgrim, but Vaughan is never out of it.