73 similar circumstances, asks for advice from Andrew Marvell's father. Such an escapade belongs to a mind that must have been ardent and daring beyond its fellows; but it also shows a somewhat shifting foundation, an imagination easily dazzled, and a pliability of will that cost us, we may believe, a poet. After Cambridge came some years of travel, which afforded material for some of his poems, such as the satire on Holland, of which the cleverness is still apparent, though its elaborate coarseness and pedantic humour make it poor pasture to feed the mind upon. But the period to which we owe almost all the true gold among his poems, he spent at Nunappleton House, 1650-1652, as is the two years which tutor to the daughter of the great Lord Fairfax, the little Lady Mary Fairfax, then twelve years old. Marvell was at this time twenty-nine; and that exquisite relation which may exist between a grown man, pure in heart, and a young girl, when disparity of fortune and circumstance forbids all thought of marriage, seems to have been the mainspring of his song. Such a relation is half tenderness which dissembles its passion, and half worship which laughs itself away in easy phrases. The lyric "Young Love," which indubitably though not confessedly refers to Mary Fairfax, is one of the sweetest poems of pure feeling in the language. Common beauties stay fifteen ; Love as much the snowy lamb, As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice. Now then love me; Time may take And learn love before we may. It is delightful in this connection to think of the signet-ring with the device of a fawn,-which he used in early life and may still be seen on his papers, as a gift of his little pupil, earned doubtless by his poem on the Dying Fawn, which is certainly an episode of Lady Mary's childhood. In this group of early poems, which are worth all the rest of Marvell's work put together, several strains predominate. In the first place there is a close observation of Nature, even a grotesque transcription, with which we are too often accustomed only to credit later writers. For instance, in "Damon the Mower" he writes: The grasshopper its pipe gives o'er, And hamstringed frogs can dance no more; And grasshoppers seek out the shades. The second line of this we take to refer to the condition to which frogs are sometimes reduced 75 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 The hatching throstle's shining eye, 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, Is pinched yet nearer by the beast. 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. 483-54 I am the mower Damon, known Through all the meadows I have mown; And again, of the mowers, Who seem like Israelites to be Appleton Nie 389-92 The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure-and here lies the charmare 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 66 '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 |