Henry Vaughan(1621–1695)

Henry Vaughan was born on the seventeenth of April 1621 at Newton-by-Usk in the parish of Llansantffraed in Brecknockshire, twin elder son of Thomas Vaughan, a small Welsh-speaking laird of the Usk valley descended from the Vaughans of Tretower, and Denise Morgan of Llansantffraed. His twin brother Thomas Vaughan (the alchemist Eugenius Philalethes, fellow of Jesus College Oxford and the leading English-language Hermetic philosopher of the period) was his lifelong literary collaborator and the most important formative influence on his work. He was schooled at home by the Welsh-speaking clergyman Matthew Herbert (a cousin of George Herbert), went up with his brother to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638, took no degree on the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, and returned to the Usk valley to study law for two years at London and then medicine at Oxford.

He served briefly as a Royalist soldier in the Civil War (his elder brother William died of his wounds at the Royalist defeat at Rowton Heath in 1645, the bereavement that turned Henry inward to the religious lyric of his mature work), and set up around 1648 as a country physician practising from Newton-by-Usk along the upper Usk valley, the practice he kept for the next forty-seven years to his death. He published his first volume Poems with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished in 1646, a slight collection in the courtly-Cavalier vein that did not survive its first printing. The hinge of his work came with his conversion experience around 1648, on the death of his brother William, the reading of George Herbert's Temple, and the political collapse of the Royalist cause; the work he produced from that hinge is the basis of his reputation.

Silex Scintillans (the Flashing Flint), the central volume, was published in two parts: Part I in 1650 (seventy-nine poems) and the enlarged second edition with the additional Part II in 1655 (a further fifty-eight poems). The collection takes the Herbert Temple architecture as its model but moves into a register of metaphysical-and-mystical natural-theology of light, sleep, dawn, mountains, springs and stars unlike anything else in the seventeenth-century English religious lyric. The Retreat, The World, The Night, They Are All Gone into the World of Light and the long meditative I saw Eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light from The World are on every modern anthology of seventeenth-century English verse. Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality of 1804 is in direct conscious descent from Vaughan's The Retreat (and the eight-line opening of Wordsworth's poem is a paraphrase of Vaughan's), the link that brought Vaughan back into the English literary canon after 1800.

He published two further verse and prose collections, Olor Iscanus (The Swan of Usk, 1651) and Thalia Rediviva (1678), and the long prose devotional The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (1652). He practised medicine in the Usk valley through the long Restoration and Glorious Revolution years, took a second wife in 1655 (Elizabeth Wise of Llansantffraed), held the small inheritance at Newton through the difficult years of the parliamentary land settlement, and died at Llansantffraed on the twenty-third of April 1695 in his seventy-fifth year. He is buried in the parish churchyard at Llansantffraed under a flat slab with the Latin epitaph he composed for himself. The Vaughan signature Silurist (the Welshman of the territory of the ancient Silures, the south-east-Welsh tribe of the late Roman period) is the byname under which his name is universally remembered in English literary history. The Vaughan name in modern English-language religious lyric carries the weight of Silex Scintillans.