He never dangers either saw or feared: A neighbouring wood, born with himself, he sees, Thus health and strength he to a third age enjoys, About the spacious world let others roam: HENRY VAUGHAN. HENRY VAUGHAN (1614-1695) published in 1651 a volume of miscellaneous poems, evincing considerable strength and originality of thought and copious imagery, though tinged with a gloomy sectarianism and marred by crabbed rhymes. Mr Campbell scarcely does justice to Vaughan in styling him 'one of the harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit,' though he admits that he has 'some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild-flowers on a barren heath.' As a sacred poet, Vaughan has an intensity of feeling only inferior to Crashaw. He was a Welshman (born in Brecknockshire), and had a dash of Celtic enthusiasm. He first followed the profession of the law, but afterwards adopted that of a physician. He does not seem to have attained to a competence in either, for he complains much of the proverbial poverty and suffering of poets: As they were merely thrown upon the stage, In his latter days, Vaughan grew deeply serious and devout, and published a volume of religious poetry, containing his happiest effusions. The poet was not without hopes of renown, and he wished the river of his native vale to share in the distinction: When I am laid to rest hard by thy streams, Early Rising and Prayer. [From Silex Scintillans, or Sacred Poems.] Yet never sleep the sun up; prayer should Walk with thy fellow-creatures; note the hush Serve God before the world; let him not go Mornings are mysteries; the first, the world's youth, When the world's up, and every swarm abroad, The Rainbow. [From the same. me.] Still young and fine, but what is still in view The Story of Endymion. [Written after reading M. Gombauld's romance of Endymion.] Near fair Eurotas' banks; what solemn green What ages they consume: with the sad vale Some crystal spring, that from the neighbour down Timber. Sure thou didst flourish once, and many springs, Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, Passed o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers. 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. THOMAS STANLEY.. THOMAS STANLEY, the learned editor of Eschylus and author of a History of Philosophy, appears early in this period as a poet, having published a volume of his verses in 1651. The only son of Sir Thomas Stanley, knight, of Camberlow-Green, in Hertfordshire, he was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford; spent part of his youth in travelling; and afterwards lived in the Middle Temple. His poems, whether original or translated, are remarkable for a rich style of thought and expression, though deformed to some extent by the conceits of his age. Yet, if thou choose On such thy freedom to bestow, Affection may excuse, For love from sympathy doth flow. Note on Anacreon. [The following piece is a translation by Stanley from a poem by St Amant, in which that writer had employed his utmost genius to expand and enforce one of the over-free sentiments of the bard of Teios.] Let's not rhyme the hours away; With his fiddlestick and quill; And the Muses, though they're gamesome, They are neither young nor handsome; And their freaks in sober sadness Are a mere poetic madness: Pegasus is but a horse; He that follows him is worse. Wine, my boy; we'll sing and laugh, With this draught of unmixed Rhenish; By thy Thyrsus so renowned; By the healths with which th' art crowned; By the feasts which thou dost prize; By thy numerous victories; By the howls by Monads made; By this haut-gout carbonade; By the sound thy orgies spread; By thy language cabalistic; By thy cymbal, drum, and his stick; By the tunes thy quart-pots strike up; By this sweet, this fresh and free air; By thy goat, as chaste as we are; To thy frolic order call us, Knights of the deep bowl install us; And to shew thyself divine, Never let it want for wine. Note to Moschus. [Stanley here translates a poem of Marino, in which that writer had in his eye the second idyl of Moschus.] Along the mead Europa walks, To choose the fairest of its gems, The common people of the field, The votive offering of their scent. When deathless Amaranth, this strife, Begs she would her green thread of life, Pliant Acanthus now the vine The Violet, by her foot opprest, Doth from that touch enamoured rise, But, losing straight what made her blest, Hangs down her head, looks pale, and dies. Clitia, to new devotion won, Doth now her former faith deny, Sees in her face a double sun, And glories in apostasy. The Gillyflower, which mocks the skies- A brighter lustre from her eyes, And richer scarlet from her cheeks. The jocund flower-de-luce appears, As represented now in fire. The Crocus, who would gladly claim In hopes to be more fortunate. His head the drowsy Poppy raised, Awaked by this approaching morn, And viewed her purple light amazed, Though his, alas! was but her scorn. None of this aromatic crowd, But for their kind death humbly call, Courting her hand, like martyrs proud, By so divine a fate to fall. The royal maid th' applause disdains Sweet daughter of the spring, the Rose. She, like herself, a queen appears, SIR JOHN DENHAM. SIR JOHN DENHAM (1615-1668) was the son of the chief-baron of exchequer in Ireland, and was born at Dublin, but educated at Oxford, then the chief. resort of all the poetical and high-spirited cavaliers. Denham was wild and dissolute in his youth, and squandered away great part of his patrimony at the gaming-table. He was made governor of Farnham Castle by Charles I.; and after the monarch had been delivered into the hands of the army, his secret correspondence was partly carried on by Denham, who was furnished with nine several ciphers for the purpose. Charles had a respect for literature as well as the arts; and Milton records of him that he made Shakspeare's plays the closet-companion of his solitude. It would appear, however, that the king wished to keep poetry apart from state affairs; for he told Denham, on seeing one of his pieces, 'that when men are young, and have little else to do, they may vent the overflowings of their fancy in that way; but when they are thought fit for more serious employments, if they still persisted in that course, it looked as if they minded not the way to any better.' The poet stood corrected and bridled in his muse. In 1639, he succeeded to his father's estate, and returned again to the gaming-table. In 1648, he was employed to convey the Duke of York to France, and resided in that country some time. His estate was sold by the Long Parliament; but the Restoration revived his fallen dignity and fortunes. He was made surveyor of the king's buildings, and a Knight of the Bath. In domestic life, the poet does not seem to have been happy. He had freed himself from his early excesses and follies, but an unfortunate marriage darkened his closing years, which were unhappily visited by insanity. He recovered, to receive the congratulations of Butler, his fellowpoet, and to commemorate the death of Cowley in one of his happiest effusions. Cooper's Hill, the poem by which Denham is now best known, was first published in 1642, but afterwards corrected and enlarged. It consists of between three and four hundred lines, written in the heroic couplet. The descriptions are interspersed with sentimental digressions, suggested by the objects around-the river Thames, a ruined abbey, Windsor Forest, and the field of Runnymede. The view from Cooper's Hill is rich and luxuriant, but the muse of Denham was more reflective than descriptive. Dr Johnson assigns to this poet the praise of being 'the author of a species of composition that may De denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.' Ben Jonson's fine poem on Penshurst may dispute the palm of originality on this point with the Cooper's Hill, but Jonson could not have written with such correctness, or with such pointed expression, as Denham. The versification of this poet is generally smooth and flowing, but he had no pretensions to the genius of Cowley, or to the depth and delicacy of feeling possessed by the old dramatists, or the poets of the Elizabethan period. He reasoned fluently in verse, without glaring faults of style, and hence obtained the approbation of Dr Johnson far above his deserts. Denham could not, like his contemporary, Chamberlayne, have described the beauty of a summer morning: The morning hath not lost her virgin blush, Nor step, but mine, soiled the earth's tinselled robe. By a full quire of feathered choristers, Chamberlayne is comparatively unknown, and has never been included in any edition of the poets, yet every reader of taste or sensibility must feel that the above picture far transcends the cold sketches of Denham, and is imbued with a poetical spirit to which he was a stranger. "That Sir John Denham began a reformation in our verse,' says Southey, is one of the most groundless assertions that ever obtained belief in literature. More thought and more skill had been exercised before his time in the construction of English metre, than he ever bestowed on the subject, and by men of far greater attainments and far higher powers. To improve, of our great writers, was impossible; it was imposindeed, either upon the versification or the diction sible to exceed them in the knowledge or in the practice of their art, but it was easy to avoid the more obvious faults of inferior authors: and in this way he succeeded, just so far as not to be included in The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease; nor consigned to oblivion with the "persons of the miscellanies of those days. His proper place is quality" "who contributed their vapid effusions to who called themselves wits, and have since been among those of his contemporaries and successors entitled poets by the courtesy of England.'† Denham, nevertheless, deserves a place in English literature, though not that high one which has heretofore been assigned to him. The traveller who crosses the Alps or Pyrenees, finds pleasure in the contrast afforded by level plains and calm streams, and sc Denham's correctness pleases, after the wild imagina. tions and irregular harmony of the greater masters of the lyre who preceded him. In reading him, we feel that we are descending into a different scenethe romance is over, and we must be content with smoothness, regularity, and order. [The Thames and Windsor Forest.] My eye, descending from the hill, surveys Though with those streams he no remembrance hold, • Chamberlayne's Love's Victory. † Southey's Cowper, vol. ii. p. 130. His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore, The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil, So that to us no thing, no place is strange, Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; * * But his proud head the airy mountain hides This scene had some bold Greek or British bard Of fairies, satyrs, and the nymphs their dames, The four lines printed in Italics have been praised by every critic from Dryden to the present day. [The Reformation-Monks and Puritans.] Here should my wonder dwell, and here my praise, But my fixed thoughts my wandering eye betrays. Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late A chapel crowned, till in the common fate Th' adjoining abbey fell. May no such storm Fall on our times, where ruin must reform! Tell me, my muse, what monstrous dire offence, What crime could any Christian king incense To such a rage? Was 't luxury or lust? Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just? Then did religion in a lazy cell, In empty, airy contemplation dwell; But to be cast into a calenture? Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance Denham had just and enlightened notions of the duty of a translator. 'It is not his business alone,' he says, 'to translate language into language, but poesy into poesy; and poesy is so subtle a spirit, that, in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the translation, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum; there being certain graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and energy to the words.' Hence, in his poetical address to Sir Richard Fanshawe, on his translation of Pastor Fido, our poet says: That servile path thou nobly dost decline Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords The two last lines are very happily conceived and expressed. Denham wrote a tragedy, the Sophy, which is but a tame common-place plot of Turkish jealousy, treachery, and murder. Occasionally, there is a vigorous thought or line, as when the envious king asks Haly: Have not I performed actions As great, and with as great a moderation? The other replies: Ay, sir, but that's forgotten; Actions of the last age are like almanacs of the last year. This sentiment was too truly felt by many of the cavaliers in the days of Charles II. We subjoin part of Denham's elegy on the death of Cowley, in which it will be seen that the poet forgot that Shakspeare was buried on the banks of his native Avon, not in Westminster Abbey, and that both he and Fletcher died long ere time had 'blasted their Were these their crimes? They were his own much bays.' more; But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor, Who having spent the treasures of his crown, On Mr Abraham Cowley. His Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets. Old Chaucer, like the morning-star, To us discovers day from far. His light those mists and clouds dissolved |