his widow, and given to the world, with other of his pieces, in a small folio, in 1681. A fine copy of this rare book is one of the most dainty and desirable of all English publications from the Restoration to the end of the century. It is not quite complete, and notably the celebrated Horatian Ode on Oliver Cromwell is not included in it,Mrs Marvell did not trouble herself with any poems but those which she possessed in her husband's handwriting, but it is still the most luxurious shape in which Marvell's poems can be read. The Nunappleton pieces are strewed over it without any attempt at arrangement, and the one. which holds the key to the rest is printed last. This is a long poem in praise of the house, written in eight-line stanzas of octo-syllabic verse, and extending to nearly eight hundred lines. Any student who wishes to understand Marvell must read this long and difficult piece with care. He will soon see that he has to deal with what Dr. Johnson called a "metaphysical," and what I have ventured to call a "Marinist" poet of the most extreme order.

Marvell is the last of the school of Donne, and in several respects he comes nearer to the master than any of his precursors. Certain conceits of Donne's, for instance that one about the lover and

the pair of compasses1, are often quoted as examples of a monstrous class. We get to think of Donne as exclusively the forger of tawdry false jewellery such as this, "rime's sturdy cripple," as Coleridge ingeniously calls him. But Donne was also the writer of lines and passages that speak so directly to the heart and to the senses that those who have come under their spell feel a sort of shyness in quoting them; they are so personal that to discuss them seems an indiscretion. Something of the same odd reserve seems due in the reader of some of Shakespeare's Sonnets, of some of Coleridge's shorter poems. I cannot, myself, bear to hear poetry of this intimate kind analyzed or even touched by unsympathetic people. This is a feeling which may not be praiseworthy in the

1

"If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two,

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run,
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun."

A Valediction forbidding Mourning.

student, but it is a proof of extraordinary felicity, mingled with sincerity, in the style of the writer so discussed or touched. There can be no doubt that Donne possesses this quality, denied perhaps to all his scholars, until revealed again, in a certain measure, in Marvell. The note, however, is not so sharply struck in him as in Donne; there is more suavity and grace. The conceits are perhaps as wild. Here is one :—

"Love wisely had of long foreseen
That he must once grow old,
And therefore stored a magazine,

To save him from the cold.
He kept the several cells replete

With nitre thrice refined,

The naphtha's and the sulphur's heat,
And all that burns the mind."

This terrible magazine, which is fortified by a double gate, and which would have enflamed the whole of nature if one spark had fallen into it, turns out to be the heart of Celia. Again, whole stanzas in the Nunappleton poem are taken up with a description of the garden as a military camp, through which the bee beats his drum, while the flowers are soldiers, who fire off volleys of perfume, and stand at parade, under their various colours, in stately regiments all day long :

"But when the vigilant patrol

Of stars walks round about the pole,
Their leaves that to their stalks are curled,
Seem to their staves the ensigns furled.
Then in some flower's belovèd hut
Each bee as sentinel is shut,

And sleeps so too, but if once stirr'd
She runs you thro' or asks the word."

This is pretty and harmless, but perhaps just because it errs so gently against the canons of style, we ask ourselves how so seriously-minded a man as Marvell could run on in such a childish way. There is a good deal in Marvell that is of this species of wit, graceful and coloured, but almost infantile. Waller and Denham had taught English people to outgrow these childish toys of fancy, and if there had been nothing more than this in Marvell, we should not be regarding him as a serious element in the reaction. But there is a great deal more, and allowing the conceits to be taken for granted, we may inquire into the character of what is best in his lyrics.

In the long Nunappleton poem, then, and in that celebrated piece which is printed now in most collections of English poetry, The Garden, we find a personal sympathy with nature, and particularly with vegetation, which was quite a novel thing,

and which found no second exponent until Wordsworth came forward with his still wider and more philosophical commerce with the inanimate world. For flowers, trees, and grasses, Marvell expresses a sort of personal passion. They stand between him. and humanity, they are to him "forms more real than living man." He calls upon the woodlands of Nunappleton to save him from the noisy world:

"Bind me, ye woodbines, in
your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines,
And oh! so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place.”

Again he says:

"How safe, methinks, and strong, behind
These trees have I encamped my mind,"

and he repeats this sentiment of the security of natural solitude again and again. His style, when he can put his conceits behind him, is extremely sharp and delicate, with a distinction of phrase that is quite unknown to most of his contemporaries. To praise "The Garden" or "Bermudas" would be an impertinence; but I think few readers know what charming and unique poetry lies hid in the series of poems in which Marvell writes as a