Vaughan, then, owed something to Herbert, although it was by no means the best which Herbert could give; but he himself is, what Herbert is not, an ancestor. He leans forward to touch Cowper and Keble; and Mr. Churton Collins has taken the pains to trace him in Tennyson. The angels who “familiarly confer Beneath the oak and juniper,” invoke an instant thought of the Milton of the _Allegro_; and the fragrant winds which linger by Usk, “loaden with the rich arrear,” appear to be Milton’s, too. His austere music first sounded in the public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, much his junior, began to print. It would seem very unlikely that a Welsh physician should be beholden long after to the manuscripts of the Puritan stripling, close-kept at Cambridge and Horton; but it is interesting to find the prototype of Vaughan’s charming lines about Rachel, “the sheep-keeping Syrian maid,” in the _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, dating from 1631.[34] Vaughan’s dramatic Fleet Street, “Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way,” might as well be Swift’s, or Crabbe’s; and his salutation to the lark, “And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light, Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing,” is like a quotation from some tender sonnet of Bowles, or from his admirer, the young Coleridge who instantly outstepped him. _Olor_, _Silex_, and _Thalia_ establish unexpected relationships with genius the most remote from them and from each other. The animated melody of poor Rochester’s best songs seems deflected from “If I were dead, and in my place,” addressed to Amoret,[35] in the _Poems_ of 1646. The delicate simile, “As some blind dial, when the day is done, Can tell us at midnight there was a sun,” and “But I am sadly loose and stray, A giddy blast each way. O let me not thus range: Thou canst not change!” (a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the eighth chapter to the Romans), come home with a smile to the lover of Clough. Vaughan was that dangerous person, an original thinker; and the consequence is that he compromises a great many authors who may never have heard of him. It is admitted now that we owe to his prophetic lyre one of the boasts of modern literature. Dr. Grosart has handled so well the obvious debt of Wordsworth in _The Intimations of Immortality_, and has proven so conclusively that Vaughan figured in the library at Rydal Mount, that little need be said here on that theme. In _Corruption_, _Childhood_, _Looking Back_, and _The Retreat_, most markedly in the first, lie the whole point and pathos of “Trailing clouds of glory do we come From Heaven, which is our home.”