It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Vaughan to love, or serve, art and nature for themselves. His cue was to walk abroad circumspectly and with incessant reverence, because in all things he found God. He marks, at every few rods in the thickets, “those low violets of Thine,” and the “breathing sacrifice” of earth-odors which the “parched and thirsty isle” gratefully sends back after a shower.[28] His prayer is that he may not forget that physical beauty is a great symbol, but only a symbol; a “hid ascent” through “masks and shadows” to the divine; or, as Mr. Lowell said in one of his last poems, “a tent Pitched for an Inmate far more excellent.” A humanist of the school of Assisi, Vaughan was full of out-of-door meeknesses and pieties, nowhere sweeter in their expression than in this all-embracing valedictory: “O knowing, glorious Spirit! when Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men, * * * * * Give him among Thy works a place Who in them loved and sought Thy face.” He muses in the garden, at evenfall: “Man is such a marigold As shuts, and hangs the head.” Clouds, seasons, and the eternal stars are his playfellows; he apostrophizes our sister the rainbow, and reminds her of yesterday, when “Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot, The youthful world’s grey fathers, in one knot,” lifted anxious looks to her new splendor. He is familiar with the depression which comes from boding weather, when “a pilgrim’s eye, Far from relief, Measures the melancholy sky.” He has an artist’s feeling, also, for the wrath of the elements, which inevitably hurry him on to the consummation “When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred store Of thunders in that heat, And low as e’er they lay before Thy six-days buildings beat!” “I saw,” he says, suddenly— “I saw Eternity the other night”; and he is perpetually seeing things almost as startling and as bright: the “edges and the bordering light” of lost infancy; the processional grandeur of old books, which he fearlessly calls “The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way”; and visions of the Judgment, when “from the right The white sheep pass into a whiter light.” Here the figure beautifully forecasts a famous one of Rossetti’s. Light, indeed, is Vaughan’s distinctive word, and the favorite source of his similes and illustrations.