20. Lines and phrases of marvellous felicity

Two curious Welsh brothers for today : because they don't make 'em like they did in the 17th century.

VAUGHAN, HENRY (1621-1693), called "the Silurist," poet and mystic, was born into an ancient Welsh family settled at Skethiog-on-Usk, in the parish of Llansaintfraed, Brecknockshire, in 1621. From 1632 to 1638 he and his twin brother Thomas were privately educated by the rector of Llangattock, and then they proceeded to Jesus College, Oxford. At what time Henry left the university is not known ; but it was evidently after he had studied for some time in London and had been introduced into the society of men of letters that he printed his first volume, Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646). Of this publication he was afterwards, very needlessly, ashamed. Vaughan presently became a physician and returned to his native country, first for a while practising in the town of Brecon, and then settling down for the remainder of his life in Skethiog. From this place he sent forth his collection of sacred poems, Silex Scintillans, in 1650, of which a second part appeared in 1655, and the secular poems of his Olor Iscanus, prepared for the press in 1647, and published without his consent by his brother Thomas in 1651. A mystical treatise in prose, The Mount of Olives, followed in 1652, and then two prose translations, Flores Solitudinis, 1654, and Hermetical Physick, 1655. The world took little notice of these performances. In 1678 an Oxford friend collected the miscellaneous verses of Vaughan's middle life in a volume entitled Thalia Rediviva. Henry Vaughan died at Skethiog on 23d April 1693, and lies buried in the churchyard of Llansaintfraed.

As a poet Vaughan comes latest in the so-caled "metaphysical" school of the 17th century. He is the most remote of the disciples of Donne, and follows him mainly as he saw him reflected in George Herbert. He analyses his experiences, amatory and sacred, with excessive ingenuity, striking out, every now and then, through his extreme intensity of feeling and his close though limited observation of nature, lines and phrases of marvellous felicity. He is of imagination all compact, and is happiest when he abandons himself most completely to his vision. His verse is apt to seem crabbed and untunable in comparison with that of Crashaw, and even of Herbert at his best. The Retreat, with its Wordsworthian intimations, The World, mainly because of the magnificence of its opening lines, and, Beyond the Veil are by far the most popular of Vaughan's poems and represent him at his best. His passion for the Usk, and his desire to immortalize that pastoral river, are pathetically prominent in his writings. His metrical ear was not fine, and he affected, almost more than Herbert himself, tortured and tuneless forms of self-invented stanza.

VAUGHAN, THOMAS (1621-1665), "the Rosicrucian," was the twin brother of Henry VAUGHAN (see above). When Thomas left Oxford he went into the church and became rector of his native parish Llansaintfraed until his ejectment, when he settled at Oxford as an alchemist. He died at Albury on 27th February 1665, poisoned by the fumes of a cauldron. Under the pseudonym of Eugenius Philalethes, Thomas Vaughan produced eleven volumes defending and describing the tenets of Rosicrucians. The titles of these - among which are The Man-Mouse, 1650 ; The Second Wash, 1651 ; The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, 1652 ; Aula Lucis, 1652 ; and Euphrates, 1653 - are not more extraordinary than their style. Henry More the Platonist engaged in controversy with Thomas Vaughan, deep calling unto deep in pamphlets.

You may judge the marvellous felicity of "The World" for yourself, courtesy of www.luminarium.org . It begins

I SAW Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright ;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd ; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.

FOOTNOTE: Eagle-eyed pedants will have noticed that I have given Thomas Vaughan's date of death as 1665, rather than the 1666 which all other sources in Interwebshire show. Please be assured that I have transcribed diligently, and 1665 is the date given in the 9th Edition. It seems likely that Britannica was, in this unfortunate instance, in error, but the tantalising possibility remains that EB9 got it right, and that later citings have been perpetuating someone else's error. If any Accordingianists happen to be in the vicinity of Albury any time, could you possibly check the parish records (or gravestone if there is one) and clarify this troublesome matter? A substantial reward is on offer (subject to availability: the alternative being an insubstantial reward).

13. Prostrated in mind, body, by sunstroke, and in the dust

Communications from the 9th Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica community of enthusiasts have enlightened me to usage of the extremely convenient EB9 abbreviation in reference to the object of our fascination, and I will henceforth endeavour to bandy the term liberally throughout these postings.

The author of the lyrics of the rousingly patriotic Rule Britannia, was the Scotsman James Thomson (1700-1748). Cheery national fervour notwithstanding, Thomson was no stranger to melancholy. EB9 informs us that it was

while he lingered in the neighbourhood of Barnet, without employment, without money, with few friends, saddened by the loss of his mother (his father had died when he was eighteen), that Thomson conceived the idea of his first poems on the season, Winter. The lines-

Welcome, kindred glooms,
Congenial horrors, hail!

came from the heart ; they expressed his own forlorn mood on the approach of the winter of 1725. Winter appeared in the spring of 1726. [...] The tradition is that it attracted no notice for a month, but that, at the end of that time, a literary clergyman, Whately, chanced to take it up from a bookseller's counter, and at once rushed off to the coffee-houses to proclaim the discovery of a new poet.

It is a sad reflection of our times that literary clergymen are rarely now to be seen rushing into coffee-houses to proclaim similar revelations, or that if they do, the modern Briton would hardly be roused from his mochaccino and sudoku to notice.


When it comes to the inspirational power of misery, THOMSON, James (1700-1748) is somewhat overshadowed by THOMSON, James (1834-1882), author of The City of Dreadful Night
and

born at Port Glasgow, in Renfrewshire, the eldest child of a mate in the shipping service. His mother was a deeply religious woman of the Irvingite sect, and it is not improbable that it was from her the son inherited his sombre and imaginative temperament. On her death, James, then in his seventh year, was procured admission into the Caledonian Orphan Asylum, from which he went out into the world as an assistant army schoolmaster. At the garrison at Ballincollig, near Cork, he encountered the one brief happiness of his life : he fell passionately in love with, and was in turn as ardently loved by, the daughter of the armourer-sergeant of a regiment in the garrison, a girl of very exceptional beauty and cultivated mind. Two years later, when Thomson was at the training college at Chelsea, he suddenly received news of her fatal illness and death. The blow prostrated him in mind and body ; and the former endured a hurt from which it never really recovered. Henceforth his life was one of gloom, disappointment, misery, and poverty, rarely alleviated by episodes of somewhat brighter fortune.

[...] In 1872 Thomson went to the Western States of America, as the agents of shareholders in what he ascertained to be a fraudulent silver mine ; and the following year he received a commission from The New York World to go to Spain as its special correspondent with the Carlists. During the two months of his stay in that distracted country he saw little real fighting, and was himself prostrated by a sunstroke.

[..] All his best work was produced between 1855 and 1875 ("The Doom of a City," 1857 ; "Our Ladies of Death," 1861 ; Weddah and Om-el-Bonain : "The Naked Goddess," 1866-7 ; The City of Dreadful Night, 1870 - 74). In his latter years Thomson too often sought refuge from his misery of mind and body in the Lethe of opium and alcohol. His mortal illness came upon him in the house of a poet friend ; and he was conveyed to University College hospital, in Gower Street, where shortly after he died (June 3, 1882). He was buried at Highgate cemetary, in the same grave, in unconsecrated ground, as his friend Austin Holyoake.

Anyone as unfamiliar as I was until today with the work of this unfortunate poet, will be richly rewarded by a reading of his great work, which these opening verses amply testify:

LO, thus, as prostrate, “In the dust I write
My heart’s deep languor and my soul’s sad tears.”
Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
To blot the sunshine of exultant years?
Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?
Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,
And wail life’s discords into careless ears?

Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth
Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,
False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
Because it gives some sense of power and passion
In helpless innocence to try to fashion
Our woe in living words howe’er uncouth.