Vaughan’s work is thickly sown with personalities, but they are so
delicate and involved that there is little profit in detaching them.
What record he made at the University is not apparent; nor is it at
all sure that so independent and speculative a mind applied itself
gracefully to the curriculum. He was, in the only liberal sense, a
learned man, full of life-long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden
Tree. His lines beginning
“Quite spent with thought I left my cell”
show the acutest thirst for hidden knowledge; he would “most gladly
die,” if death might buy him intellectual growth. He looks forward to
eternity as to the unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. He makes the
soul sing joyously to the body:
“I that here saw darkly, in a glass,
But mists and shadows pass,
And by their own weak shine did search the springs
And source of things,
Shall, with inlighted rays,
Pierce all their ways!”
With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:
“Who circled in
Corruption with this glorious ring?”
What Vaughan does know is nothing to him; when he salutes the Bodleian
from his heart, he is thinking how little honey he has gathered from
that vast hive, and how little it contains, when measured with what
there is to learn from living and dying. He had small respect for the
sinister sciences among which the studies of his beloved brother,
a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no pedant, he dearly loved to
get in a slap against the ignorant whom we have always with us. At
twenty-five, he printed a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juvenal, and
flourished his wit, in the preface, at the expense of some possible
gentle reader of the parliamentary persuasion who would “quarrel with
antiquitie.” “These, indeed, may think that they have slept out so many
centuries in this Satire, and are now awaked; which had it been still
Latin, perhaps their nap had been everlasting!”
He was an optimist, proven through much personal trial; he had
sympathy with the lower animals, and preserved a humorous deference
towards all things alive, even the leviathan of Holy Writ, which
he affectionately exalts into “the shipmen’s fear” and “the comely
spacious whale”! Vaughan adored his friends; he had a unique veneration
for childhood; his adjective for the admirable and beautiful, whether
material or immaterial, is “dear”; and his mind dwelt with habitual
fondness on what Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his own heart) calls
“incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but
tenderly touch.”
His occupation as a resident physician must have fostered his fine
eye and ear for the green earth, and furnished him, day by day,
with musings in sylvan solitudes, and rides abroad over the fresh
hill-paths. The breath of the mountains is about his books. An early
riser, he uttered a constant invocation to whomever would listen, that
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