The Mount of Olives (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Mount of Olives\nHenry Vaughan, as a poet, has been well treated by posterity. The verse collected under the title of Silex Scintillans has appeared in numerous and varied editions. H is prose works, how ever, have su?'ered from nu merited disregard; and The Mount of Olives, the fruits of his retirement, filled like his poetry with the cloistered peace and devout spirit of the true Christian, has been reprinted but twice since the publication, in 1652, of the original volume from which the present text is derived. Vaughan is a companion for the meek, the gentle, the humble in heart — he sh'eets no aggressive mission, counsels no hard discipline of his fellow-men. A te cluse for the greater part of his life, he had in his youth tasted the bitterness and sounded the vanity of the world; and out of his experience came, in all their calm and abstinence, the prayers now reprinted. He advocates the internal life, whose sweets he himself had found good. The literary value of The Mount of Olives may not be of the highest, although it would be di?icult to surpass in its own kind such a passage, for instance, as the Meditation at the Setting of the Sun. But the purity, the devout quietude, the beauty of his thought entitles Vaughan to a place among the religious classics.