{\b Henry Vaughan}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 17 April 1622

{\b Date of Death}.: 23 April 1695

{\b Works}.

Welsh poet. His most important book is the collection of religious verse Silex 
Scintillans ['Shining Flint'], first issued in 1650, and enlarged in 1655. 
Poems such as 'Regeneration', 'The World' and 'They Are All Gone into the 
World of Light' embody an unusually intense spiritual vision, and his feeling 
for the natural world gives his best work a vividly immediate quality. His 
religious convictions are also developed in the prose works The Mount of 
Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652) and Flores Solitudinis (1654).

{\b Featured Works}.

'The Retreat', 'Peace', 'Childhood', 'Man', 'The Night', 'Quickness', 'The Waterfall',
'The World'.

{\b General Comment}.

Henry Vaughan was born into a middle-class Welsh family in Breconshire. In 
1638 he went to Jesus College, Oxford, with his brother Thomas, who later 
achieved fame as an alchemist. Henry left Oxford in 1640 without taking a 
degree, and spent two years in London studying law. He was recalled home when 
the Civil War broke out, and he is thought to have served on the Royalist side 
in South Wales sometime around 1645.

In 1646 Vaughan married Catherine Wise and published his first book of verse, 
Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished. The poems were secular in 
theme and attracted little attention. They appear uninspired when compared 
with the religious poetry of Silex Scintillus. In the preface to the second 
edition of Silex Vaughan attributes the transformation of his life and work to 
a spiritual awakening brought about by reading the poems of 'the blessed man, 
Mr. George Herbert'. On the title page of this work, he describes himself as 
'Henry Vaughan, Silurist' referring to the ancient British tribe of Silures 
who once lived in Brecon.

During the 1650s Vaughan began practising medicine. After the death of his 
first wife he married her sister Elizabeth in about 1655. He had four children 
by each wife, and in his later years he became involved in legal wrangles with 
his older children. Though his poetry did not attract much attention for a 
long time after his death, Vaughan is now established as one of the finest 
religious poets in the language, and in some respects he surpassed his 
literary and spiritual master, George Herbert.