THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 25

"Magnanimous despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing."


CHILDHOOD


One of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with the
full spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few but
students until Mr. E. K. Chambers gave us his excellent edition.
The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw's lovely rapture,
are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banished
into life. Vaughan's imagination suddenly opens a new window
towards the east. The age seems to change with him, and it is one
of the most incredible of all facts that there should be more than
a century--and such a century!--from him to Wordsworth. The
passing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing of
Pope, Prior, and Gray--of the world, the world, whether reasonable
or flippant or rhetorical--is more strange. Vaughan's phrase and
diction seem to carry the light. Il vous semble que cette femme
degage de la lumiere en marchant? Vous l'aimez! says Marius in Les
Miserables (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense of
light that we know the muse we are to love.


SCOTTISH BALLADS


It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads
from among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with
thin places. Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the
finest, those that had passages of genius--a line here and there of
surpassing imagination and poetry--rare in even the best folk-
songs. Such passages do not occur but in ballads that are
throughout on the level of the highest of their kind. "None but my
foe to be my guide" so distinguishes Helen of Kirconnell; the
exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, The Wife of Usher's Well;
its varied refrain, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; the stanza spoken by
Margaret asking for room in the grave, Sweet William and Margaret;
and a number of passages, Sir Patrick Spens, such as that
beginning, "I saw the new moon late yestreen," the stanza beginning
"O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords," and almost all the
stanzas following. A Lyke Wake Dirge is of surpassing quality
throughout. I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson's version of