But, as in nature, when the day
Breaks, night adjourns,

Stars shut up shop, mists pack away,
And the moon mourns.

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,
Were still alive-thou dost great storms resent
Before they come, and know'st how near they be.

Else all at rest thou liest, 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.

Or this poem on Friends Departed, of which I will read

some verses:

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit ling'ring here;

Their very memory is fair and bright,

And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest
After the sun's remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

O holy Hope! and high Humility,

High as the heavens above!

These are your walks, and you have show'd them me,
To kindle my cold love.

Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the Just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,

Could man outlook that mark!

He that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know,
At first sight, if the bird be flown;

But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.

And yet as Angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul, when man doth sleep:

So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.

If a star were confined into a tomb,

Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock'd her up gives room,
She'll shine through all the sphere.

O Father of eternal life, and all

Created glories under Thee!

Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.

Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass:

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,
Where stands a winged sentry

All skilful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger,

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,
There grows the flower of Peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges;
For none can thee secure
But One who never changes-

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,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

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
Shined in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought:
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first Love...
When on some gilded cloud, or flow'r
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of Eternity.