Spare Hours

Now, not greater is the change we made from that low, small, stifling, gloomy, mephitic room, into the glorious open air, the loch lying asleep in the sun, and telling over again on its placid face, as in a dream, every hill and cloud, and birch and pine, and passing bird and cradled boat; the Black Wood of Rannoch standing “in the midst of its own darkness,” frowning out upon us like the Past disturbed, and far off in the clear ether, as in another and a better world, the dim Shepherds of Etive pointing, like ghosts at noonday, to the weird shadows of Glencoe; – not greater was this change, than is that from the dingy, oppressive, weary “cemetery” of mere word-knowledge to the open air, the light and liberty, the divine infinity and richness of nature and her teaching.

We cannot change our time, nor would we if we could. It is God’s time as well as ours. And our time is emphatically that for achieving and recording and teaching man’s dominion over and insight into matter and its forces – his subduing the earth; but let us turn now and then from our necessary and honest toil in this neo-Platonic cavern where we win gold and renown, and where we often are obliged to stand in our own light, and watch our own shadows as they glide, huge and misshapen, across the inner gloom; let us come out betimes with our gold, that we may spend it and get “goods” for it, and when we can look forth on that ample world of daylight which we can never hope to overrun, and into that overarching heaven where, amid clouds and storms, lightning and sudden tempest, there is revealed to those who look for them, lucid openings into the pure, deep empyrean, “as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness;” and when, best of all, we may remember Who it is who stretched out these heavens as a tent to dwell in, and on whose footstool we may kneel, and out of the depths of our heart cry aloud, —

Te Deum veneramur,Te Sancte Pater!

we shall return into our cave, and to our work, all the better of such a lesson, and of such a reasonable service, and dig none the worse.

Science which ends in itself, or still worse, returns upon its maker, and gets him to worship himself, is worse than none; it is only when it makes it more clear than before who is the Maker and Governor, not only of the objects, but of the subjects of itself, that knowledge is the mother of virtue. But this is an endless theme. My only aim in these desultory hints is to impress parents and teachers with the benefits of the study, the personal engagement – with their own hands and eyes, and legs and ears – in some form or another of natural history, by their children and pupils and themselves, as counteracting evil, and doing immediate and actual good. Even the immense activity in the Post-Office-stamp line of business among our youngsters has been of immense use in many ways, besides being a diversion and an interest. I myself came to the knowledge of Queensland, and a great deal more, through its blue twopenny.

If any one wishes to know how far wise and clever and patriotic men may occasionally go in the way of giving “your son” a stone for bread, and a serpent for a fish, – may get the nation’s money for that which is not bread, and give their own labor for that which satisfies no one; industriously making sawdust into the shapes of bread, and chaff into the appearance of meal, and contriving, at wonderful expense of money and brains, to show what can be done in the way of feeding upon wind, – let him take a turn through certain galleries of the Kensington Museum.

“Yesterday forenoon,” writes a friend, “I went to South Kensington Museum. It is really an absurd collection. A great deal of valuable material and a great deal of perfect rubbish. The analyses are even worse than I was led to suppose. There is an ANALYSIS OF A MAN. First, a man contains so much water, and there you have the amount of water in a bottle; so much albumen, and there is the albumen; so much phosphate of lime, fat, hæmatin, fibrine, salt, etc., etc. Then in the next case so much carbon; so much phosphorus – a bottle with sticks of phosphorus; so much potassium, and there is a bottle with potassium; calcium, etc. They have not bottles of oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, etc., but they have cubical pieces of wood on which is written ‘the quantity of oxygen in the human body would occupy the space of 170 (e. g.) cubes of the size of this,’ etc., etc.” What earthly good can this do any one?

No wonder that the bewildered beings whom I have seen wandering through these rooms, yawned more frequently and more desperately than I ever observed even in church.

So then, cultivate observation, energy, handicraft, ingenuity, outness in boys, so as to give them a pursuit as well as a study. Look after the blade, and don’t coax or crush the ear out too soon, and remember that the full corn in the ear is not due till the harvest, when the great School breaks up, and we must all dismiss and go our several ways.

VAUGHAN’S POEMS, &c

Ὄσα ἐστὶ προσφιλῆ – ταῦτα λογίζεσθε. – St. Paul.

VAUGHAN’S POEMS, &c

“What do you think of Dr. Channing, Mr. Coleridge?” said a brisk young gentleman to the mighty discourser, as he sat next him at a small tea-party. “Before entering upon that question, sir,” said Coleridge, opening upon his inquirer those ‘noticeable gray eyes,’ with a vague and placid stare, and settling himself in his seat for the night, “I must put you in possession of my views, in extenso, on the origin, progress, present condition, future likelihoods, and absolute essence of the Unitarian controversy, and especially the conclusions I have, upon the whole, come to on the great question of what may be termed the philosophy of religious difference.” In like manner, before telling our readers what we think of Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, or of “V.,” or of Henry Ellison, the Bornnatural, or of E. V. K., it would have been very pleasant (to ourselves) to have given, in extenso, our views de Re Poeticâ, its nature, its laws and office, its means and ends; and to have made known how much and how little we agreed on these points with such worthies as Aristotle and Plato, Horace and Richard Baxter, Petronius Arbiter and Blaise Pascal, Ulric von Hütten and Boileau, Hurdis and Hurd, Dr. Arnold and Montaigne, Harris of Salisbury and his famous uncle, Burke and “John Buncle,” Montesquieu and Sir Philip Sidney, Dr. Johnson and the two Wartons, George Gascoyne and Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey, Puttenham and Webbe, George Herbert and George Sand, Petrarch and Pinciano, Vida and Julius Cæsar Scaliger, Pontanus and Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt and Quinctilian, or Tacitus (whichever of the two wrote the Dialogue De Oratoribus, in which there is so much of the best philosophy, criticism, and expression), Lords Bacon and Buchan and Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart and John Dryden, Charles Lamb and Professor Wilson, Vinet of Lausanne and John Foster, Lord Jeffrey and the two brothers Hare, Drs. Fuller and South, John Milton and Dr. Drake, Dante and “Edie Ochiltree,” Wordsworth and John Bunyan, Plutarch and Winkelman, the Coleridges, Samuel, Sara, Hartley, Derwent, and Henry Nelson, Sir Egerton Bridges, Victor Cousin and “the Doctor,” George Moir and Madame de Staël, Dr. Fracastorius and Professor Keble, Martinus Scriblerus and Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay and the Bishop of Cloyne, Collins and Gray and Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt and John Ruskin, Shakspeare and Jackson of Exeter, Dallas and De Quincey, and the six Taylors, Jeremy, William, Isaac, Jane, John Edward, and Henry. We would have had great pleasure in quoting what these famous women and men have written on the essence and the art of poetry, and to have shown how strangely they differ, and how as strangely at times they agree. But as it is not related at what time of the evening our brisk young gentleman got his answer regarding Dr. Channing, so it likewise remains untold what our readers have lost and gained in our not fulfilling our somewhat extensive desire.

It is with poetry as with flowers or fruits, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, we would all rather have them, and smell them, and taste them, than hear about them. It is a good thing to know all about a lily, its scientific ins and outs, its botany, its archæology, its æsthetics, even its anatomy and “organic radicals,” but it is a better thing to look at itself, and “consider” it how it grows —

“White, radiant, spotless, exquisitely pure.”

It is one thing to know what your peach is, that it is the fruit of a rosal exogen, and is of the nature of a true drupe, with its carpel solitary, and its style proceeding from the apex, – that its ovules are anatropal, and that its putamen separates sponte suâ from the sacrocarp; to know, moreover, how many kinds of peaches and nectarines there are in the world, and how happy the Canadian pigs must be of an evening munching the downy odoriferous drupes under the trees, and what an aroma this must give to the resulting pork,44– it is another and a better thing to pluck the peach, and sink your teeth into its fragrant flesh. We remember only one exception to this rule. Who has ever yet tasted the roast pig of reality which came up to the roast pig of Charles Lamb? Who can forget “that young and tender suckling, under a moon old, guiltless as yet of the style, with no original speck of the amor immunditiæ– the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest, and which, when prepared aright, is, of all the delicacies in the mundus edibilis, the most delicate —obsoniorum facile princeps– whose fat is not fat, but an indefinable sweetness growing up toward it – the tender blossoming of fat – fat cropped in the bud – taken in the shoot – in the first innocence, the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food – the lean not lean, but a kind of animal manna —cœlestis—cibus ille angelorum– or rather shall we say, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosial result.” But here, as elsewhere, the exception proves the rule, and even the perusal of “Original” Walker’s delicious schemes of dinners at Lovegrove’s, with flounders water-zoutched, and iced claret, would stand little chance against an invitation to a party of six to Blackwall, with “Tom Young of the Treasury” as Prime Minister.

Poetry is the expression of the beautiful – by words – the beautiful of the outer and of the inner world; whatever is delectable to the eye or the ear, the every sense of the body and of the soul – it presides over veras dulcedines rerum. It implies at once a vision and a faculty, a gift and an art. There must be the vivid conception of the beautiful, and its fit manifestation in numerous language. A thought may be poetical, and yet not poetry; it may be a sort of mother liquor, holding in solution the poetical element, but waiting and wanting its precipitation, – its concentration into the bright and compacted crystal. It is the very blossom and fragrancy and bloom of all human thoughts, passions, emotions, language; having for its immediate object – its very essence – pleasure and delectation rather than truth; but springing from truth, as the flower from its fixed and unseen root. To use the words of Puttenham in reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, poetry is a lofty, insolent (unusual) and passionate thing.

It is not philosophy, it is not science, it is not morality, it is not religion, any more than red is or ever can be blue or yellow, or than one thing can ever be another; but it feeds on, it glorifies and exalts, it impassionates them all. A poet will be the better of all the wisdom, and all the goodness, and all the science, and all the talent he can gather into himself, but quâ poet he is a minister and an interpreter of τὸ καλὸν, and of nothing else. Philosophy and poetry are not opposites, but neither are they convertibles. They are twin sisters; – in the words of Augustine: – “Philocalia et Philosophia prope similiter cognominatæ sunt, et quasi gentiles inter se videri volunt et sunt. Quid est enim Philosophia? amor sapientiæ. Quid Philocalia? amor pulchritudinis. Germanæ igitur istæ sunt prorsus, et eodem parente procreatæ.” Fracastorius beautifully illustrates this in his “Naugerius, sive De Poeticâ Dialogus.” He has been dividing writers, or composers as he calls them, into historians, or those who record appearances; philosophers, who seek out causes; and poets, who perceive and express veras pulchritudines rerum, quicquid maximum et magnificum, quicquid pulcherrimum, quicquid dulcissimum; and as an example, he says, if the historian describe the ongoings of this visible universe, I am taught; if the philosopher announce the doctrine of a spiritual essence pervading and regulating all things, I admire; but if the poet take up the same theme, and sing —

“Principio cælum ac terras camposque liquentesLucentemque globum lunæ, titaniaque astra,Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artusMens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.”

“Si inquam, eandem rem, hoc pacto referat mihi, non admirabor solum, sed adamabo: et divinum nescio quid, in animum mihi immissum existimabo.”

In the quotation which he gives, we at once detect the proper tools and cunning of the poet: fancy gives us liquentes campos, titania astra, lucentem globum lunæ, and fantasy or imagination, in virtue of its royal and transmuting power, gives us intus alit—infusa per artus– and that magnificent idea, magno se corpore miscet– this is the divinum nescio quid– the proper work of the imagination – the master and specific faculty of the poet – that which makes him what he is, as the wings make a bird, and which, to borrow the noble words of the Book of Wisdom, “is more moving than motion, – is one only, and yet manifold, subtle, lively, clear, plain, quick, which cannot be letted, passing and going through all things by reason of her pureness; being one, she can do all things; and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new.”

The following is Fracastorius’ definition of a man who not only writes verses, but is by nature a poet: “Est autem ille naturâ poeta, qui aptus est veris rerum pulchritudinibus capi monerique; et qui per illas loqui et scribere potest;” and he gives the lines of Virgil, —

“Aut sicuti nigrumIlicibus crebris sacra nemus accubat umbra,”

as an instance of the poetical transformation. All that was merely actual or informative might have been given in the words sicuti nemus, but fantasy sets to work, and videte, per quas pulchritudines, nemus depinxit; addens ACCUBAT, ET NIGRUM crebris ilicibus et SACRA UMBRA! quam ob rem, recte Pontanus dicebat, finem esse poetæ, apposite dicere ad admirationem, simpliciter, et per universalem bene dicendi ideam. This is what we call the beau idéal, or κατ’ ἐξοχήν the ideal – what Bacon describes as “a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul, and the exhibition of which doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind.” It is “the wondrous and goodly paterne” of which Spenser sings in his “Hymne in honour of Beautie:” —

“What time this world’s great Workmaister did castTo make al things such as we now behold,It seems that he before his eyes had plastA goodly Paterne, to whose perfect mouldHe fashioned them, as comely as he could,That now so faire and seemly they appeare,As nought may be amended any wheare.“That wondrous Paterne wheresoere it bee,Whether in earth layd up in secret store,Or else in heaven, that no man may it seeWith sinfull eyes, for feare it to deflore,Is perfect Beautie, which all men adore —That is the thing that giveth pleasant graceTo all things fair.“For through infusion of celestial powreThe duller earth it quickneth with delight,And life-full spirits privily doth powreThrough all the parts, that to the looker’s sightThey seeme to please.”

It is that “loveliness” which Mr. Ruskin calls “the signature of God on his works,” the dazzling printings of His fingers, and to the unfolding of which he has devoted, with so much of the highest philosophy and eloquence, a great part of the second volume of “Modern Painters.”

But we are as bad as Mr. Coleridge, and are defrauding our readers of their fruits and flowers, their peaches and lilies.

Henry Vaughan, “Silurist,” as he was called, from his being born in South Wales, the country of the Silures, was sprung from one of the most ancient and noble families of the Principality. Two of his ancestors, Sir Roger Vaughan and Sir David Gam, fell at Agincourt. It is said that Shakspeare visited Scethrog, the family castle in Brecknockshire; and Malone guesses that it was when there that he fell in with the word “Puck.” Near Scethrog, there is Cwn-Pooky, or Pwcca, the Goblin’s valley, which belonged to the Vaughans; and Crofton Croker gives, in his Fairy Legends, a fac-simile of a portrait, drawn by a Welsh peasant, of a Pwcca, which (whom?) he himself had seen sitting on a milestone,45 by the roadside, in the early morning, a very unlikely personage, one would think, to say, —

“I go, I go; look how I go;Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.”

We can more easily imagine him as one of those Sprites —

“That do runBy the triple Hecat’s team,From the presence of the Sun,Following darkness like a dream.”

Henry, our poet, was born in 1621; and had a twin-brother, Thomas. Newton, his birthplace, is now a farm-house on the banks of the Usk, the scenery of which is of great beauty. The twins entered Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638. This was early in the Great Rebellion, and Charles then kept his Court at Oxford. The young Vaughans were hot Royalists; Thomas bore arms, and Henry was imprisoned. Thomas, after many perils, retired to Oxford, and devoted his life to alchemy, under the patronage of Sir Robert Murray, Secretary of State for Scotland, himself addicted to these studies. He published a number of works, with such titles as “Anthroposophia Theomagica, or a Discourse of the Nature of Man, and his State after Death, grounded on his Creator’s Proto-chemistry;” “Magia Adamica, with a full discovery of the true Cœlum terræ, or the Magician’s Heavenly Chaos and the first matter of all things.”

Henry seems to have been intimate with the famous wits of his time: “Great Ben,” Cartwright, Randolph, Fletcher, &c. His first publication was in 1646: – “Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished, by Henry Vaughan, Gent.” After taking his degree in London as M. D., he settled at his birthplace, Newton, where he lived and died the doctor of the district. About this time he prepared for the press his little volume, “Olor Iscanus, the Swan of Usk,” which was afterwards published by his brother Thomas, without the poet’s consent. We are fortunate in possessing a copy of this curious volume, which is now marked in the Catalogues as “Rariss.” It contains a few original poems; some of them epistles to his friends, hit off with great vigor, wit, and humor. Speaking of the change of times, and the reign of the Roundheads, he says, —

“Here’s brotherly Ruffs and Beards, and a strange sightOf high monumental Hats, tane at the fightOf eighty-eight; while every Burgesse footsThe mortal Pavement in eternall boots.”

There is a line in one of the letters which strikes us as of great beauty: —

“Feed on the vocal silence of his eye.”

And there is a very clever poem Ad Amicum Fœneratorem, in defiance of his friend’s demand of repayment of a loan.

There is great beauty and delicacy of expression in these two stanzas of an epithalamium: —

“Blessings as rich and fragrant crown your heads,As the mild heaven on roses sheds,When at their cheeks (like pearls) they weareThe clouds that court them in a tear.“Fresh as the houres may all your pleasures be,And healthfull as Eternitie!Sweet as the flowre’s first breath, and closeAs th’ unseen spreadings of the RoseWhen she unfolds her curtained head,And makes her bosome the Sun’s bed!”

The translations from Ovid, Boece, and Cassimir, are excellent.

The following lines conclude an invitation to a friend: —

“Come then! and while the slow isicle hangsAt the stifle thatch, and Winter’s frosty pangsBenumme the year, blithe as of old let usMid noise and war, of peace and mirth discusse.This portion thou wert born for. Why should weVex at the time’s ridiculous miserie?An age that thus hath fooled itself, and will,Spite of thy teeth and mine, persist so still.Let’s sit then at this fire; and, while wee stealA revell in the Town, let others seal,Purchase, and cheat, and who can let them pay,Till those black deeds bring on the darksome day.Innocent spenders wee! a better useShall wear out our short lease, and leave the obtuseRout to their husks. They and their bags at bestHave cares in earnest. Wee care for a jest!”

When about thirty years of age, he had a long and serious illness, during which his mind underwent an entire and final change on the most important of all subjects; and thenceforward he seems to have lived “soberly, righteously, and godly.”

In his Preface to the “Silex Scintillans,” he says, “The God of the spirits of all flesh hath granted me a further use of mine than I did look for in the body; and when I expected and had prepared for a message of death, then did he answer me with life; I hope to his glory, and my great advantage; that I may flourish not with leafe only, but with some fruit also.” And he speaks of himself as one of the converts of “that blessed man, Mr. George Herbert.”

Soon after, he published a little volume, called “Flores Solitudinis,” partly prose and partly verse. The prose, as Mr. Lyte justly remarks, is simple and nervous, unlike his poetry, which is occasionally deformed with the conceit of his time.

The verses entitled “St. Paulinus to his wife Theresia,” have much of the vigor and thoughtfulness and point of Cowper. In 1655, he published a second edition, or more correctly a re-issue, for it was not reprinted, of his Silex Scintillans, with a second part added. He seems not to have given anything after this to the public, during the next forty years of his life.

He was twice married, and died in 1695, aged 73, at Newton, on the banks of his beloved Usk, where he had spent his useful, blameless, and, we doubt not, happy life; living from day to day in the eye of Nature, and in his solitary rides and walks in that wild and beautiful country, finding full exercise for that fine sense of the beauty and wondrousness of all visible things, “the earth and every common sight,” the expression of which he has so worthily embodied in his poems.

In “The Retreate,” he thus expresses this passionate love of Nature —

“Happy those early dayes, when IShin’d in my Angell-infancy!Before I understood this placeAppointed for my second race,Or taught my soul to fancy oughtBut a white, Celestiall thought;When yet I had not walkt aboveA mile or two from my first love,And looking back, at that short space,Could see a glimpse of his bright face;When on some gilded Cloud or flowreMy gazing soul would dwell an houre,And in those weaker glories spySome shadows of eternity;Before I taught my tongue to woundMy Conscience with a sinfule sound,Or had the black art to dispenceA sev’rall sinne to ev’ry sence,But felt through all this fleshly dresseBright shootes of everlastingnesse.O how I long to travell back,And tread again that ancient track!That I might once more reach that plaine,Where first I left my glorious traine;From whence th’ Inlightned spirit seesThat shady City of Palme trees.”

To use the words of Lord Jeffrey as applied to Shakspeare, Vaughan seems to have had in large measure and of finest quality, “that indestructible love of flowers, and odors, and dews, and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight, which are the material elements of poetry; and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion which is its essence and its vivifying power.”

And though what Sir Walter says of the country surgeon is too true, that he is worse fed and harder wrought than any one else in the parish, except it be his horse; still, to a man like Vaughan, to whom the love of nature and its scrutiny was a constant passion, few occupations could have furnished ampler and more exquisite manifestations of her magnificence and beauty. Many of his finest descriptions give us quite the notion of their having been composed when going his rounds on his Welsh pony among the glens and hills, and their unspeakable solitudes. Such lines as the following to a Star were probably direct from nature on some cloudless night: —