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Henry Vaughan




Henry Vaughan ( April 17 , 1622 - April 28 , 1695 ) was a Welsh Metaphysical Poet and a doctor, the twin brother of the philosopher Thomas Vaughan .

Vaughan was born, and lived for most of his life, in the village of Llansanffraid , near Brecon , where he is buried. During the English Civil War , he was a Royalist sympathiser. He took his literary inspiration from his native environment, calling himself a "Silurist" in homage to the Silures , the Celtic tribe of south Wales which resisted the Roman Invasion Of Britain . Vaughan's greatest verse appears in the collection ''Silex scintillans'', first published in 1650 .

Henry Vaughan's poetry reflects his love of nature and Mysticism and influenced the work of Wordsworth , among others. Much of Vaughan's poetry has a particularly modern sound. This is an example of an especially beautiful fragment of one of his poems entitled
The World:

:I saw eternity the other night

:Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

:All calm as it was bright,

:And round beneath it time in hours, days, years,

:Driven by the spheres,

:Like a vast shadow moved in which the world

:And all her train were hurled.



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