in a season of extreme drought, when the pools are dry. Marvell must have seen a frog with his thighs drawn and contracted from lack of moisture making his way slowly through the grass in search of a refreshing swamp; this is certainly minute observation, as the phenomenon is a rare Again, such a delicate couplet as, one. And through the hazels thick espy is not the work of a scholar who walks a country road, but of a man who will push his way into the copses in early spring, and has watched with delight the timorous eye and the upturned beak of the thrush sunk in her nest. Or again, speaking of the dwindled summer stream running so perilously clear after weeks of drought that the fish are languid: The stupid fishes hang, as plain As flies in crystal overta'en, Or of the hayfield roughly mown, into which the herd has been turned to graze : And what below the scythe increast, The mower's work, begun and ended with the dews, in all its charming monotony, seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Marvell; he recurs to it in more than one poem. I am the mower Damon, known And again, of the mowers, Who seem like Israelites to be The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure-and here lies the charm— are not those of Nature in her sublimer or more elated moods, but the gentler and more pastoral elements, that are apt to pass unnoticed at the time by all but the true lovers of the quiet country side, and crowd in upon the mind when surfeited by the wilder glories of peak and precipice, or where tropical luxuriance side by side with tropical aridity blinds and depresses the sense, with the feeling that made Browning cry from Florence, Oh, to be in England, now that April's there! Marvell's lines, "On the Hill and Grove at Billborow," are an instance of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after antithesis and strangeness, it is true, but the spirit underlies the lines. The poem however must be read in its entirety to gain the exact impression. Again, for simple felicity, what could be more airily drawn than the following from "The Garden"?--- Here at the fountain's sliding foot, My soul into the boughs doth glide, Then whets and claps its silver wings. Or this, from the Song to celebrate the marriage of Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell, of the undisturbed dead of night ?— The astrologer's own eyes are set, Other poems, such as the "Ode on the Drop of At the same time it must be confessed that Marvell's imagery is sometimes at fault-it would be strange if it were not so; he falls now and then, the wonder is how rarely, to a mere literary conceit. Thus the mower Damon sees himself reflected in his scythe; the fawn feeds on roses till its lip seems to bleed," not with a possibly lurking thorn, but with the hue of its pasturage. With Hobbinol and Tomalin for the names of swain and nymph unreality is apt to grow. When the garden is compared to a fortress and its scents to a salvo of artillery and, Well shot, ye firemen ! O how sweet Then in some flower's beloved hut Each bee as sentinel is shut, And sleeps so, too-but if once stirred, here, in spite of a certain curious felicity, we are in the region of false tradition and rococo expression. The poem of "Eyes and Tears," again (so whimsically admired by Archbishop Trench), is little more than a string of conceits; and when in "Mourning" we hear that She courts herself in amorous rain, Herself both Danae and the shower; when we are introduced to Indian divers who plunge in the tears and can find no bottom, we think of Macaulay's "Tears of Sensibility," and Crashaw's fearful lines on the Magdalene's eyes Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Nevertheless Marvell's poems are singularly free as a rule from this strain of affectation. He has none of the morbidity that often passes for refinement. The free air, the wood-paths, the full heat of the summer sun-this is his scenery; we are not brought into contact with the bones beneath the rose-bush, the splintered sun-dial, and the stagnant pool. His pulses throb with ardent life, and have none of the “inexplicable faintness" of a deathlier school. What would not Crashaw have had to say of the "Nuns of Appleton " if he had been so unfortunate as to have lighted on them? But Marvell writes: Our orient breaths perfumed are Most strangely our complexion clears; And passing by a sweet and natural transition to his little pupil, the young Recluse of Nunapple ton I see the angels, in a crown, On you the lilies showering down, That something more than human speaks The poems contain within themselves the germ of the later growth of satire in the shape of caustic touches of humour, as well as a certain austere philosophy that is apt to peer behind the superficial veil of circumstance, yet without dreary introspection. There is a Dialogue between Soul and Body, which deals with the duality of human nature which has been the despair of all philosophers and the painful axiom of all religious teachers. Marvell makes the Soul say: |