If Vaughan’s had not been so profoundly moral a nature, he would have lacked his picturesque sense of the general, the continuous. That shibboleth, “a primrose by the river’s brim,” is to him all the generations of all the yellow primroses smiling there since the Druids’ day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects the hope and fear and pathos of the mortal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted it, age after age. Whatever he meets upon his walk is drowned and dimmed in a wide halo of association and sympathy. His unmistakable accent marks the opening of a little sermon called _The Timber_; a sigh of pity, tender as a child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs: “Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springs Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings, Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29] Leigh Hunt once challenged England and America[30] to produce anything approaching, for music and feeling, the beauty of “boughs that shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” He forgot the closes of these artless lines of a minor poet; or he did not know them. Vaughan’s meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four critics eminently fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime; but, curiously enough, none of these, not even the best of them, the same Charles Lamb who said a just and generous word for Wither, had the satisfaction of rescuing his sunken name. Lamb’s friend, the good soul Bernard Barton, seems, however, to have known and admired his Vaughan.