SOURCE: "Henry Vaughan," in A Little English Gallery, Harper and Brothers, 1894, pp. 55-118.

Guiney was an American poet, literary essayist, and Vaughan scholar who edited and published an edition of The Mount of Olives in 1902. In 1895 she began corresponding with a fellow admirer of Vaughan, Gwenllian Morgan, and together they made plans to publish an edition of Vaughan's poetry, with biographical essays by the editors. This work was not completed during the lifetime of either woman; but after their deaths, the notes they had compiled in preparation were used by F. E. Hutchinson in his definitive Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (1947). In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1894, Guiney offers high praise for Vaughan as an essentially orthodox Christian poet, comparable in accomplishment to Edmund Spenser.

It is a saw of Dr. Johnson's that it is impossible for theology to...