But, as in nature, when the day Stars shut up shop, mists pack away, Stars 'shut up shop'! Et sunt commercia coeli with a vengeance! So much for the debit side; now for the credit. At first sight it seems a paradox to claim that a poet so imitative is actually more original and certainly of deeper insight as well as of ampler, more celestial range than the man he copied. And yet it is so, as I think almost anyone will confess after reading Vaughan's Eternity or The Timber: 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, lodged 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. But thou beneath the sad and heavy line Of death, doth waste all senseless, cold, and dark; Where not so much as dreams of light may shine, 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, Else all at rest thou liest, and the fierce breath Or this poem on Friends Departed, of which I will read some verses: They are all gone into the world of light! Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear. It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, I see them walking in an air of glory, O holy Hope! and high Humility, High as the heavens above! These are your walks, and you have show'd them me, Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the Just, Could man outlook that mark! He that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know, But what fair well or grove he sings in now, And yet as Angels in some brighter dreams So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, If a star were confined into a tomb, Her captive flames must needs burn there; O Father of eternal life, and all Created glories under Thee! Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill Or else remove me hence unto that hill, Where I shall need no glass. The paradox is not so strange as it appears. Some most original men-Vaughan among them-want starting. They have the soluble genius within them, but it will not crystallise of itself; it must have a shape, a mould. And such men take the mould supplied by their age: it may not be the best for them, but it is what comes to hand. That Vaughan's 'conceits' are often abominably bad where Herbert's were good, does not prove him the lesser genius. Rather, the argument may lie the other way-that he executed them badly because he was naturally superior to such devices, whereas they fitted Herbert's cleverer talent like a glove. Το prove how simple and direct Vaughan could be when he chose I will conclude this sketch of him with a short and well-known poem quite free of conceits. It is called Peace: My soul, there is a country Far beyond the stars, All skilful in the wars: Sweet Peace sits crown'd with smiles, And One born in a manger Commands the beauteous files. He is thy gracious Friend, And-O my soul, awake!— Did in pure love descend To die here for thy sake. If thou canst get but thither, Thy God, thy life, thy cure. I propose in my next lecture, Gentlemen, to start by examining one most important poem of Vaughan's, which will lead us on to deal expeditiously with Traherne, Quarles, the two Fletchers, Crashaw, and maybe one or two other poets on this line of spiritual ancestry. Yet one last word, which I had almost forgotten. Can you not see that, while we have mystics among us, death for our literature is impossible? No schoolmaster, even, can kill an instinct which lifts the heads of all nobler young spirits to look past his herding, for they scent the high waterbrooks. So mysticism too, in its turn, witnesses and guarantees that until the soul of man be dust, literature shall be alive. III. TRAHERNE, CRASHAW AND OTHERS I VERYONE knows Wordsworth's ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood: and the stanza Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy.... I need rehearse no more. And almost everyone knows— or, to speak accurately, has been told (which is a somewhat different thing)—that Wordsworth borrowed his thought from Vaughan's famous poem The Retreat: Happy those early days, when I |