he was withal a staunch friend, a lover of hospitality, of outdoor life and of home; content to dwell among his own people in his native place and there, through "Many fair years spent in one quiet cell," to pass his life as a simple country gentleman, to practise the mystery of healing, to herborize, meditate, and relish versing. If history has little to relate of outward circumstance he himself tells us much, for his verse reveals his inner life with transparent sincerity. He might not inaptly have applied to himself the words of a contemporary physician, Sir Thomas Browne : "Now for my life, it is a miracle which to relate were

not a history but a piece of poetry."

It is pleasant to recall a picture presented by an appreciative writer of sixty years ago, the author of Horae Subsecivae: "though what Sir Walter says of the country surgeon is too true, that he is worse fed and harder wrought than anyone 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 passion, 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." Vaughan had, indeed, a passion for nature; he shared with the greatest of English poets "that indestructible love of flowers, and odours, 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." Reaching forward across the Classicist interval from 1660 to 1740 through Gray and the Wartons-more especially in their Letters and Essays-through Collins and Cowper and Wordsworth, he is in the succession of our more modern poets in his subjective treatment of external nature. Introspectively his mood responded readily to the sombre and mysterious; to "that charm in a melancholy solitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects which," as a modern

66

was to be one of the leading characteristics of the

writer avers, Romantic School."

A nest of nights, a gloomy sphere,

Where shadows thicken, and the cloud
Sits on the sun's brow all the year,

And nothing moves without a shroud.

more

In such lines suggestiveness, as of some formless emotion of fore-
boding and horror, is attained by symbolic imagery;
habitually imagination is still harnessed to the visible and concrete.
His mystic and devout temper finds utterance in passages, at times,
of sustained beauty and even of splendour; on the other hand he
will be found to be "very much the poet of fine lines and stanzas,
of imaginative intervals." Often, as happened with his elder
contemporary, George Herbert, "his poems begin finely and then
lose themselves in the sands, or else, to use his own image, some
very flinty ground yields a quite unanticipated spark." As has
been well said of a present-day poet, so perhaps it may be said of
Vaughan: "an epithet or phrase glows; it seldom flowers."
A felled tree by coppice or road-side calls forth two exquisite
stanzas, but the mood as frequently happens is not sustained :

Sure thou didst flourish once! and many springs,
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers
Pass'd 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 thrives at their root.

In "The Shower," a blithe and lyrical expression of a fit of happiness accordant with the hour and the scene, we have a little poem suggestive perhaps of Grasmere, in Westmorland, rather than of Newton upon Usk :

Waters above! eternal springs !

The dew that silvers the Dove's wings!

O welcome, welcome to the sad!

Give dry dust drink; drink that makes glad!
Many fair evenings, many flow'rs

Sweeten'd with rich and gentle showers

Have I enjoy'd, and down have run

Many a fine and shining sun;

But never, till this happy hour,

Was blest with such an evening-shower!

A certain swift unexpectedness of metaphor or paradox forms no slight element in the quality of Vaughan's appeal: "How shrill are silent tears." "The vocal silence of his eye." Bright books! . . . The track of fled souls and their Milky Way." The whole creation shakes off night, And for Thy shadow looks, the light." In an invocation to the Deity he touches the sublime : "There is in God-some say-a deep, but dazzling darkness. The poet's sombre and powerful imagery evokes strange pictures : So neatly weav'd, like arras, they descry Fables with truth, fancy with history.

. .

DISTINCTION.

OF this quality the world is impatient; it chafes

against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it; it ends by receiving its influence, and by undergoing its law. This quality at last inexorably corrects the world's ideals. It procures that the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet. MATTHEW ARNOLD

The Haunting Playmate

By JAMES A. MACKERETH

Heigh, you !-coy spirit-Somebody
That trips my garden-ground with me,
Whom oft I feel, and faintly spy
With eye that sees beyond the eye,
Your sudden mirth fills now my ear :
turn, but
you are nowhere here
In bush, or shadow-folding tree,
Or ferny grot. Yet, thing of glee,
I heard your rippling laughter call
Clear as a little waterfall.

I

Sweet visitant, you touch the mind
But leave no substance in the wind;
Your heart, your hand, your voice, your eyes
Are of the stuff of Paradise,

Some lucent airy waif are you,

A truant, dashed with rainbow dew

Brushed from the boughs where sunbeams swim
In gardens of the seraphim;
You come, you go, and are to me
A voice, a mirth, a mystery,
A life too subtle-rare and clear
To cast a bodied shadow here.
Elusive mischief, spilling joy,
Are you some careless cherub-boy
That drops from glad Elysian dells
A laughter of enchanted bells?
Or are you dancing damsel-sprite,
Compact of dazzling sound and light,

Escaped through open nursery doors
Of heaven to skip on earthly floors ?
Bright elfin playmate, you must hide
On my five senses' other side:
The magic wonder of your word
Is lost before my heart has heard.
Your twinkling smile is toward me cast;
While slow sight fumbles it is past.
Yet still within my spirit-ear
There lingers lyrical and clear
That medley faint from Elfland dells,
Your laughter, like enchanted bells.

Sonnet to a Gruyère

By IVAN ALAN SEYMOUR

Thou mitey atom, so sublimely prim
As on my cleanly earthenware you sit—
So soapy-soft, my spongy favourite--
Altho' you be but churned and curdled skim,
I seem to know in you a far-off glim

Of Switzerland. Your odour does transmit
My mind to snow-crown'd mountains-apposite
To where the herds wind home as light grows dim-
Their cow-bells swaying as they saunter back,
Past many a clumsy, rudely-moulded shack-
Until at length their cargo they discharge;
Then, for the night, go wandering at large-
Little opining that their produce may
Be sent as cheese, to mice and men, some day.