Few studies are more fascinating than that of the liquidation, so to speak, of Vaughan’s brief, tense, impassioned monodies into “the mighty waters rolling evermore” of the great _Ode_. It is Holinshed’s accidental honor that he is lost in Shakespeare, and incorporated with him. So with Vaughan: if shorn of his dues, he still remains illustrious by virtue of one signal service to Wordsworth, whom, in the main, he distinctly foreshadows. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be jealous that the “first sprightly runnings” of a classic should not be better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes. In the broad range of English letters we find two persons whose normal mental habits seem altogether of a piece with Vaughan’s: a woman of the eighteenth century, and a philosopher of the nineteenth. The lovely _Petition for an Absolute Retreat_, by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (whose genius was the charming _trouvaille_ of Mr. Edmund Gosse), might pass for Vaughan’s, in Vaughan’s best manner; and so might “Their near camp my spirit knows By signs gracious as rainbows,” as indeed the whole of Emerson’s ever-memorable _Forerunners_, itself a mate for _The Retreat_; or rather, had these been anonymous lyrics of Vaughan’s own day, it would have been impossible to persuade a Caroline critic that he could not name their common author. Our poet had a curious fashion of coining verbs and adjectives out of nouns, and carried it to such a degree as to challenge pre-eminence with Keats. “O how it bloods And spirits all my earth!” is part and parcel of the young cries of Endymion. When Vaughan has discovered something to produce a fresh effect, he is not the man who will hesitate to use it; and this mannerism occurs frequently: “our grass straight russets,” “angel’d from that sphere,” “the mountained wave,” “He heavened their walks, and with his eyes made those wild shades a Paradise.” A little informality of this sort sometimes justifies itself, as in the couplet ending the grim and powerful _Charnel-House_: “But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain, One check from thee shall channel it again!” And Henry Vaughan shares also with Keats, writing three hundred years later, a defect which he had inherited, together with many graces, directly from Ben Jonson:[36] the fashion of crowding the sense of his text and the pauseless voice of his reader from the natural breathing-place at the end of a line into the beginning or the middle of the next line. More than any other, except Keats in his first period, he roughens, without always strengthening, his rich decasyllabics, by using what Mr. Gosse has happily classified as the “overflow.”