suggest that his scrutiny, in some cases, has been confined to the rival titles. It is certain that no other mind, however bent upon identifications, can find a likeness between The Quip and The Queer, or between The Tempest and Providence. Vaughan's Mutiny, like The Collar, ends in a use of the word " child," after a scene of strife; and if ever it were meant to match Herbert's poem, distinctly falls behind it, and deals, besides, with a much weaker rebelliousness. Rules and Lessons is so unmistakably modeled upon

HERBERT.

"A throbbing conscience, spurrèd by remorse, Hath a strange force."

"My thoughts are all a case of knives, Wounding my heart

With scattered smart."

"And trust

Half that we have

Unto an honest faithful grave."

"Teach me Thy love to know,

That this new light which now I see
May both the work and workman show:
Then by a sunbeam I will climb to Thee!"

"I will go searching, till I find a sun

Shall stay till we have done,

A willing shiner, that will shine as gladly As frost-nipt suns look sadly.

Then we will sing and shine all our own day, And one another pay:

His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine

Till even his beams sing, and my music shine."

The Church Porch that it scarcely calls for comment. Herbert's admonitions, however, are continued, but nowhere repeated; and Vaughan's succeed in being poetic, which the others are not. Beyond these replicas Vaughan's structural genius is in no wise beholden to Herbert's. But numerous phrases and turns of thought descend from the master to the disciple, undergoing such subtle and peculiar changes that it may well be submitted whether, in this casual list, every borrowing, save two, be not a bettering.

VAUGHAN.

"A darting conscience, full of stabs and fears.”

"And wrap us in imaginary flights Wide of a faithful grave."

"That in these masks and shadows I may see Thy sacred way,

And by these hid ascents climb to that day Which breaks from Thee

Who art in all things, though invisibly!"

"O would I were a bird or star Fluttering in woods, or lifted far Above this inn

And road of sin!

Then either star or bird would be Shining or singing still to Thee!"

(Of books.)

"The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way."

"I walked the other day to spend my hour
Into a field,
Where I sometime had seen the soil to yield
A gallant flower."

"A silent tear can pierce Thy throne
When loud joys want a wing;
And sweeter airs stream from a groan
Than any artèd string."

"At first Thou gavest me milk and sweet

nesses,

I had my wish and way;

My days were strewed with flowers and happiness;

There was no month but May."

"Only a scarf or glove

Doth warm our hands, and make them write of Love."

"I got me flowers to strew Thy way,
I got me boughs off many a tree;
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought Thy sweets along with Thee."

"O come! for Thou dost know the way: Or if to me Thou wilt not move, Remove me where I need not say, 'Drop from above.'"

"Sure Thou wilt joy by gaining me To fly home like a laden bee."

To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal courts of literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses it. Herbert's odd and fresh metaphors, his homing bees and pricks of conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and his comrade bird, even his famous female scarf, go over bodily to the spoiler. In many an instance something involved and difficult still characterizes Herbert's diction; and it is diverting to watch how the interfering hand sorts and settles it at one touch, and sends it, as Mr. Arnold would say, to the "centre." Vaughan's mind, despite its mysticism, was full of dispatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself more than once as "fierce;" and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him. There was in Vaughan, at his height, a rush and fire which Herbert never knew, a greater clarity and conciseness, a far greater restraint, a keener sense both of color and form, and so much more deference for what Mr. Ruskin calls "the peerage of words " that the younger man could never have been content to send forth a line which might mean its opposite, such as occurs in the fine stanza about 44 NO. 439.

VOL. LXXIII.

or the tranquil confession of faith,
"Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy hands made both, and I am there:
Thy power and love, my love and trust,
Make one place everywhere!

For his best is not Herbert's best, nor his worst Herbert's worst. It is not Vaughan who reminds us that "filth " lies under a fair face. He does the "fiercer" thing: he goes to the pit's mouth in a trance, and "hears them yell." Herbert's noblest and most winning art still has its stand upon the altar steps of The Temple; but Vaughan is always on the roof, under the stars, like a somnambulist, or actually above and out of sight, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane;" absorbed in larger and wilder things, and stretching the spirits of all who try to follow him. The homelier and more restful writer has had his reward in the world's lasting appreciation; and although Vaughan had a favorable

opinion of his own staying powers, nothing would have grieved him less than to step aside, if the choice had lain between him and his exemplar.

Vaughan, then, owes something to Herbert, although it was by no means the best which Herbert could give; but he himself is, what Herbert is not, an ancestor.

He leans forward to touch Cowper and Keble; and Mr. Churton Collins has taken the pains to trace him in Tennyson.

The angels who

"familiarly confer

Beneath the oak and juniper," invoke an instant thought of the Milton of the Allegro; and the fragrant winds which linger by Usk, "loaden with the rich arrear," appear to be Milton's, too. His austere music first sounded in the public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, much his junior, began to print. It would seem very unlikely that a Welsh physician should be beholden to the close-kept manuscripts of the Puritan stripling at Cambridge and Horton; but it is interesting to find the prototype of Vaughan's charming lines about Rachel, the wife of Jacob,

"With native looks that knew no guile,

Came the sheep-keeping Syrian maid," in the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, dating from 1631. Vaughan's dramatic Fleet Street,

"Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way,"

might as well be Swift's; and his salutation to the lark,

"And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light, Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing," is like a quotation from some tender sonnet of Bowles, or from his admirer, the young Coleridge who instantly outstepped him. Olor, Silex, and Thalia establish unexpected relationships with genius the most remote from them and from each other. The animated melody of poor Rochester's best songs seems deflected from

"If I were dead and in my place,"

addressed to Amoret, in the Poems of 1646. The delicate simile,

"As some blind dial, when the day is done, Can tell us at midnight there was a sun,'

and

"But I am sadly loose and stray,
A giddy blast each way.
O let me not thus range:
Thou canst not change!"

(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the eighth chapter of Romans), come home with a smile to the lover of Clough. Vaughan was that dangerous person, an original thinker; and the consequence is that he compromises a great many authors who may never have heard of him. It is admitted now that we owe to his prophetic lyre one of the boasts of modern literature. Dr. Grosart has handled so well the obvious debt of Wordsworth in The Intimations of Immortality, and has proven so conclusively that Vaughan figured in the library at Rydal Mount, that little need be said here on that theme. In Corruption, Childhood, Looking Back, and The Retreat, most markedly in the first, lie the whole point and pathos of

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From Heaven, which is our home." Few studies are more fascinating than that of the liquidation, so to speak, of Vaughan's brief, tense, impassioned monodies into "the mighty waters rolling evermore" of the great Ode. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be jealous that the "first sprightly runnings" of an English classic should not be better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes.

Vaughan's elegies are so exquisite and endearing, they haunt one with the conviction that they stop short of immortality, not because their author had too little skill, but because, between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions, no art could make out to live. He had a deep heart, such as deep hearts will always recognize and reverence:

"And thy two wings were grief and love." His thoughts jostle him hard at all times; but in the face of eternity he seems so to accord with the event which all but destroys him that sorrow inexpressible becomes suddenly unexpressed, and his funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm and serenity open to no misconception. Distance, and the lapse of time, and his own utter reconciliation to the play of events make small difference in his utterance upon the old topic. The thought of his friend, forty years after, is the same mystical rapture:

"O could I track them! but souls must Track one the other;

And now the spirit, not the dust,
Must be thy brother:

Yet I have one pearl by whose light
All things I see,

And in the heart of death and night

Find Heaven and thee."

Daphnis, the eclogue to the memory of Thomas Vaughan, is the only one of these elegies which, possessing a surplus of beautiful lines, is not even in the least satisfying. "R. Hall," "no woolsack soldier," who was slain at the siege of Pontefract, won from Henry Vaughan a passionate requiem, which opens with a gush of agony, "I knew it would be thus!"- as affecting as anything in the early ballads; and the battle of Rowton Heath took from him "R. W.," "the comrade of his youth. But it was in one who bore his sovereign's name (hitherto unidentified, although he is said to have been the subject of a "public sorrow") that Vaughan lost the friend upon whom his whole nature seemed to lean. The soldier-heart in himself spoke out firmly in the cry he consecrated To the Pious Memory of C. W. Its masculine dignity; the pride and soft triumph which it gathers about it, advancing; the plain heroic ending which sweeps away all images of remoteness and night, in "Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day," can be compared to nothing but a concord of mounting strings, slowing to

their major chord with a courage and cheer that bring tears to the eyes. Vaughan's tender threnodies would make a small but precious volume. To the Pious Memory, with Thou that Knowest for Whom I Mourn, Silence and Stealth of Days, I Walked the Other Day to Spend my Hour, The Morning Watch, and Beyond the Veil are alone enough to give him rank forever as a genius and a good man.

"C. W.'s" death was one of the things which turned him from temporal pursuits and pleasures,

"Home from their dust to empty his own glass."

His thoughts centred henceforward, in their full intensity, on the supernatural world; nay, if he were irremediably depressed, not only on the persistence of resolved matter, by means of which buried men come forth again in the color of flowers and the fragrance of the wind, but even on the physical damp and dark which confine our mortality. It is the poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air who can pack horror on horror into his nervous quatrains about Death:

"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." This is masterly; but here again there is reserve, the curbing hand of a man who holds, with Plato, a willful indulgence in the "realism" of sadness to be an actual crime. Vaughan's dead dwell, indeed, as his own mind does, in "the world of light."

Chambers' Encyclopædia made an epic. blunder, long ago, when it ascribed to this gentlest of Anglicans a "gloomy sectarianism." He, of all religious poets, makes the most charming secular reading, and may well be a favorite with the heathen for whom Herbert is too decorative, Crashaw too hectic and intense, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too fluent, Lyra Apostolica a treatise, though a glo

rious one, on Things which Must be Revived, and Hymns Ancient and Modern an exceeding weariness to the spirit. It is a saw of Dr. Johnson's that it is difficult for theology to clothe itself in attractive numbers; but then Dr. Johnson was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in human nature to refuse to cherish the "holy, happy, healthy Heaven" which he has left us (in a graded alliteration which smacks of the physician rather than of the "gloomy sectarian"), his very social "angels talking to a man," and his bright saints hovering and smiling nigh, who

tical Christianity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. When he talks affectionately of moss and rocks or of dumb animals, it is as if they were incorporated into the ritual. He has the genius of prayer, and may be recognized by "those graces which walk in a veil and a silence." He is full of distinction, and of a sort of golden idiosyncrasy. Vaughan's true "note" is—Vaughan. To read him is like coming alone to a village churchyard with trees, where the west is dying in lilac and rose behind the low ivied Norman tower. The young choir is within, the south windows are open, and the organist, with many a hushed, unconventional interlude of his own, is rehearsing the psalm of "pleasures for evermore: "

"I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel. . . I have set the Lord always before me: because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”

Louise Imogen Guiney.

FROM the commencement of his pontificate Leo XIII. has evinced an anxious interest in the tendencies of his times. His exceptional powers of observation have been devoted to the social problems of this half-century with a solicitude which has seldom been surpassed.

The most perfect expression of his thoughts, the best evidence of the working of his mind, is to be found in the Encyclical Letters,' which are his principal literary achievements since coming to the throne. At the different periods of their appearance these letters have given rise to a variety of comments, but the commentators have been, for the most part, either unhesitatingly eulogistic because inspired by reverential feelings, or harshly critical from hostility to Catholic 1 Leonis XIII. Pontificis Maximi Epistolæ Encyclica, etc. Augusta Taurinorum. 1892.

doctrine or to received religion. Now, therefore, that the papal bullary forms a volume, it is opportune to examine it from an unsectarian point of view.

The Encyclicals embody the present sentiments of Catholicism towards passing events; in addition to which they are examples of theological reasoning and of modern Latinity. They are the voice of a voluntary prisoner who has sacrificed his liberty to the immutable. principles of the great institution which he governs, and who, in the silence of his cabinet, views and judges by the stan dard of his faith the current of men's thoughts.

Each Encyclical which issues from the Vatican is an event in the life of the Church. The bishops to whom these letters are usually addressed find in them the keynote of their future teach