Vaughan, HENRY, poet, styled 'the Silurist' from his having been born among the Silures of South Wales, was descended from an ancient family, and was born in 1622 at Newton, near Skethiog, in the parish of Llansaintfraed, Brecknockshire, twin-brother of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan (1622-65). He entered Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638, and shared the loyalty of his family, although apparently he did not actually bear arms in the cause. Early a devoted admirer of Ben Jonson, Randolph, and other poets of the day, in 1646 he published at London his first Poems, with the tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished. He now studied medicine, became M.D., and retired to practise first at, and then near, Brecon. The collection of poems entitled Olor Iscanus ('Swan of the Usk') was sent to his brother at Oxford, and was published by him without authority in 1651. About this time a long and dangerous illness deepened his religious convictions, and henceforward the themes of all verse are the littleness of time and the greatness of eternity, the sinfulness of sin, the death and saving grace of Christ. In 1650 he printed at London his Silce Scintillans ('Sparks from the Flintstone'), a collection of pious meditations after the model of Herbert (second part printed with it in 1655), and followed it up in 1652 with The Mount of Olives, a little book of devotions in prose, and the Flores Solitudinis, also in prose. Not till the year 1678 was another collection of his verses published, and this time again by a zealous Oxford friend ('J. W.') without his concurrence. This was the Thalia Rediviva; the pastimes and diversions of a Country Muse, a collection of elegies, translations, &c. of all periods of his life, closing with a few religious pieces (Pious Thoughts and Ejaculations), and a pastoral elegy on the death of his brother Thomas. Of the rest of his life we know nothing save that it wore itself away in the labour of his profession and in a quiet walk with God in his beloved vale of Usk. He died April 23, 1695. Vaughan's poetry is very unequal—his vein seems to have been a flinty soil, from which the right Promethean fire could be struck but now and then. At his best he reaches an exquisiteness of phantasy and of expression beyond the reach of Herbert, but by far the larger part of his poetry, and indeed of almost every poem, sinks below that more popular poet's usual level. 'The Retreat,' 'Childhood,' and especially 'Departed Friends' are some of the rarest flowers in the whole garden of our sacred verse, and atone for much uncouthness, obscurity, and prose. The first of these has been claimed as the prototype of Wordsworth's greater Ode, and it certainly supplies a dim hint of its fundamental thought.
There is a complete edition by Grosart (4 vols. 1868-71), and of the poems by E. K. Chambers (1896). The Silce Scintillans and other sacred poems were published by Lyte in 1847 (repr. 1858). See Dr John Brown's Horæ Subsecivæ (series i.), Palgrave's paper in Cymrodorion (1891), and Miss Guiney's English Gallery (1894).