the intellectual subtlety and, now and then, the inspired
touch of Vaughan. But he never drops into the flatness and the extravagance
of both these writers, and his beauties, assuredly not mean in themselves,
and very constantly present, are both in kind and in arrangement admirably
suited to the average comprehension. He is quaint and conceited; but his
quaintnesses and conceits are never beyond the reach of any tolerably
intelligent understanding. He is devout, but his devotion does not
transgress into the more fantastic regions of piety. He is a mystic, but of
the more exoteric school of mysticism. He expresses common needs, common
thoughts, the everyday emotions of the Christian, just sublimated
sufficiently to make them attractive. The fashion and his own taste gave
him a pleasing quaintness, which his good sense kept from being ever
obscure or offensive or extravagant. The famous "Sweet day so cool, so
calm, so bright," and many short passages which are known to every one,
express Herbert perfectly. The thought is obvious, usual, in no sense far
fetched. The morality is plain and simple. The expression, with a
sufficient touch of the daintiness of the time, has nothing that is
extraordinarily or ravishingly felicitous whether in phrasing or versing.
He is, in short, a poet whom all must respect; whom those that are in
sympathy with his vein of thought cannot but revere; who did England an
inestimable service, by giving to the highest and purest thoughts that
familiar and abiding poetic garb which contributes so much to fix any
thoughts in the mind, and of which, to tell the truth, poetry has been much
more prodigal to other departments of thought by no means so well
deserving. But it is impossible to call him a great poet even in his own
difficult class. The early Latin hymn writers are there to show what a
great religious poet must be like. Crashaw, if his genius had been less
irregular and jaculative, might have been such. Herbert is not, and could
not have been. With him it is an almost invariable custom to class Vaughan
the "Silurist," and a common one to unite George Sandys, the traveller,
translator of Ovid, and paraphrast of the Psalms and other parts of the
Bible. Sandys, an older man than Herbert by fifteen, and than Vaughan by
more than forty years, published rather late, so that he came as a sacred
poet after Herbert, and not long before Vaughan. He was son of the
Archbishop of York, and brother of that E