Vaughan was a born observer, and in his poetry may be found the pioneer expression of the nineteenth-century feeling for landscape. His canvas is not often large; he had an indifference towards the exquisite presence of autumn, and an inland ignorance of the sea. But he could portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines: “It was high spring, and all the way Primrosed, and hung with shade,” which etches for you the whole winding lane, roofed and floored with beauty; he carries a reader over half a continent in his “Paths that are hidden from the vulture’s eyes,” and suspends him above man’s planet altogether with his audacious eagle, to whom “whole seas are narrow spectacles,” and who “in the clear height and upmost air Doth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!” Besides this large vision, Vaughan had uncommon knowledge how to employ detail, during the prolonged literary interval when it was wholly out of fashion. It has been the lot of the little rhymesters of all periods to deal with the open air in a general way, and to embellish their pages with birds and boughs; but it takes a true modern poet, under the influence of the Romantic revival, to sum up perfectly the ravages of wind and frost: “Where is the pride of summer, the green prime, The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree”; and it takes another to give the only faithful and ideal report of a warbling which every schoolboy of the race had heard before him: “That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture.” That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification is remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze is upon the inaccessible ether, but he seems to detect everything between himself and heaven. He sighs over the inattentive rustic, whom, perhaps, he catches scowling by the pasture-bars of the wild Welsh downs: “O that he would hear The world read to him!” Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself hears and sees; and his interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, straight from life. He has the inevitable phrase for every phenomenon, a little low-comedy phrase, sometimes, such as Shakespeare and Carew had used before him: “Deep snow Candies our country’s woody brow.”