She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boast Of adding to old maps; though she has bin But sailing by some clear and open coast, Where all is woody, wild, and dark within. Of this forbidden fruit since we but gain A taste, by which we only hungry grow, We merely toil to find our studies vain, And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’ P. 150, No. cxxviii.--This poem, apart from its proper beauty, which is very considerable, has a deeper interest, as containing in the germ Wordsworth’s still higher strain, namely his _Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_. I do not mean that Wordsworth had ever seen this poem when he wrote his. The coincidences are so remarkable that it is certainly difficult to esteem them accidental; but Wordsworth was so little a reader of anything out of the way, and at the time when his Ode was composed, the _Silex Scintillans_ was altogether out of the way, a book of such excessive rarity, that an explanation of the points of contact between the poems must be sought for elsewhere. The complete forgetfulness into which poetry, which, though not of the very highest order of all, is yet of a very high one, may fall, is strikingly exemplified in the fact that as nearly as possible two centuries intervened between the first and second editions of Vaughan’s poems. The first edition of the first part of the _Silex Scintillans_ appeared in 1650, the second edition of the book in 1847. Oblivion overtook him from the first. Phillips in his _Theatrum Poetarum_, 1675, just mentions him and no more; and knows him only by his _Olor Iscanus_, a juvenile production, of comparatively little worth; yet seeing that it yields such lines as the following--they form part of a poem addressed to the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, our first James’ daughter--it cannot be affirmed to be of none: Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow; A flower of purpose sprung to bow To heedless tempests and the rage Of an incensèd stormy age: And yet as balm-trees gently spend Their tears for those that do them rend, Thou didst nor murmur nor revile, But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’ As a divine Vaughan may be inferior, but as a poet he is certainly superior, to Herbert, who never wrote anything so purely poetical as _The Retreat_. Still Vaughan would probably never have written as he has, if Herbert, whom he gratefully owns as his master, had not shown him the way.