SOURCE: "Henry Vaughan: The Caves of Memory," in The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton, Yale University Press, 1964, pp. 1-31.

Martz is an American educator and prominent scholar of English and American poetry. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in PMLA in 1963, he examines Vaughan's poetry in the first edition of Silex Scintillans finding it to reflect the Augustinian concept of in terior "illumination."

Modes of Communion

In the year 1649 Richard Crashaw died in exile at Loreto, a little more than six months after his master King Charles died on the scaffold at Whitehall. An era had ended for English political and religious institutions, and also for English religious poetry. With Crashaw's death the power of liturgical and eucharistic symbols died away in English poetry of the seventeenth century: the symbols earlier celebrated by Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, and Herbert. These poets had their...