Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/188

168 know very little beyond the facts that he was at Jesus College, Oxford, and in his later life became a physician. He was not at first religious, but was apparently converted by reading Herbert's poems. The verses contained in his Secular Poems (1646) and Olor Iscanus (1651) do not rise much above the level of the amatory and complimentary verses which the young gentlemen of the universities and court produced in too great abundance. Several are merely translations. The lines to the Usk, which give their name to the second collection, have little descriptive or moralising force. His best poetry is his religious, contained in the Silex Scintillans (1650-56). He follows Herbert, often closely in choice of theme and imagery, but he is less concerned about Church seasons and services, and he lacks Herbert's sustained pointedness, his effective elaboration of his conceits. Vaughan's fame rests upon poems and passages in which he reveals qualities quite distinct from Herbert's—a delicate, intense feeling for the spiritual affinities of nature unique in the century, an occasional sublimity of imaginative vision to which Herbert never attained. In this last respect some of Vaughan's lines reach the level of the greatest poetry the century produced, as—

"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 moved; in which the world              And all its train were hurled";