But still the lover wonders what they are

Who look for day before his mistress wakes.
Awake, awake! break through your veils of lawn!
Then draw your curtains, and begin the dawn."

The list of Puritan poets (setting aside the name of Milton, which is too great to class) is shorter than that of the Cavaliers, and those who are included in it, with one exception, did little to exalt in verse the cause they advocated in politics. It is needless to say that the exception is Andrew Marvell, author of the celebrated Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. He was the son of Andrew Marvell, Rector of Winestead in Holderness, Yorkshire, where he was born 31st March 1621. After receiving his first education at the Grammar School, Hull, he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, 14th December 1633. At Cambridge he fell under the influence of the Jesuits, and left the university, but being persuaded by his father to return, he was elected Scholar of Trinity College in 1638, and graduated as B.A.

in the same year. He appears to have travelled abroad

during the Civil War, and traces, perhaps, of a reaction against the Jesuits remain in one of his early satires (in the style of Donne), written against Flecknoe, an Irish priest at Rome. On his return to England he was engaged by Lord Fairfax as tutor to his daughter, Mary, at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, where he wrote his poems, Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow and Upon Appleton House, together (doubtless) with The Garden and other verses of rural description. He had hitherto shown a leaning to the Royalist side. Commendatory verses by him were prefixed to Lovelace's Lucasta, published in 1649, and on the death of Lord Hastings in that year, he wrote an elegy in which the following lines appear :

Had he but at this measure still increast,
And on the Tree of Life once made a feast,
As that of knowledge, what loves had he given
To earth, and then what jealousies to heaven!
But 'tis a maxim of that state that none,
Lest he become like them, taste more than one.

Therefore the democratic stars did rise,

And all that worth from hence did ostracise.

Marvell still retained some of his Royalist preferences when he wrote his satire on Thomas May, who died in November 1650, but his opinions must have been changing, for his Horatian Ode on Cromwell was composed in this year. After his association with Fairfax he acquiesced in the new form of government, and on 21st February 1653 was recommended by Milton as his assistant in the secretaryship for foreign tongues. This appointment, however, he did not receive till 1657, being in the meantime employed at Eton as tutor to William Dutton, a ward of Cromwell. While there he lived in the house of John Oxenbridge, a Fellow of the College, who had been a minister in the Bermudas, and whose conversation no doubt inspired Marvell with his well-known poem on those islands. Many of the events of the Protectorate furnished him with themes for verse: between 1653 and the Restoration he produced his Character of Holland (1653); First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness, the Lord Protector (1655); On the Victory obtained by Blake over the Spaniards (1657); A Poem upon the Death of his late Highness, the Lord Protector (1658). Under Richard Cromwell he was chosen M.P. for Hull, which place he continued to represent till his death. After the Restoration his political opinions became fixedly Republican, and his satiric vein keener and more uncompromising. He entered the lists in 1672, on behalf of tolerance to the Nonconformists, against Samuel Parker, the champion of the opposite party; and so skilfully did he handle the subject, by separating the interests of the King from those of the Royalists, that when Roger L'Estrange, as Licenser of the Press, sought to suppress the second edition of his pamphlet, The Rehearsal Transprosed, the King caused Lord Anglesey to intervene on his behalf. "Look you, Mr. L'Estrange," Lord Anglesey is reported to have said, "I have spoken to his Majesty about it, and the King says he will not have it suppressed, for Parker has done him wrong, and this man has done

him right." In 1677, however, he published anonymously his scathing Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, a pamphlet which produced such an effect that a reward of £100 was offered by the Crown for the discovery of the author, and Marvell himself expected assassination. From this fate, if he was ever threatened by it, he was spared by a sudden death on 18th August 1678. He was buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.

Marvell's poems divide themselves naturally into three classes: (1) rural poems and poems of pure imagination, written while he was living with Fairfax at Nun Appleton; (2) state poems, composed while he was actively employed during the Commonwealth; (3) satiric poems, written after the Restoration. The third class I reserve for consideration in a later chapter. In the first class, which has much charm and variety, he combines the "metaphysical" spirit of Donne, with Vaughan's love of Nature and Herrick's feeling for objects of art. Like Donne he loves to abstract a thought, and to play round it with subtle images. For example, he opens a poem called The Definition of Love thus :—

My Love is of a birth as rare

As 'tis, for object, strange and high;

It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility;

and this extremely intellectual notion he illustrates by the following equally subtle comparison :

As lines, so loves oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet:

But ours, so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love, which us doth bind

But Fate so enviously debars,

Is the conjunction of the mind,

And opposition of the stars.

In his well-known verses called The Garden he distinguishes between things and their mental images by the

old scholastic doctrine, that everything on the earth has its duplicate in the sea :

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:

The mind, that ocean, where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates-transcending these-
Far other worlds and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

These remotely abstract conceits he associates with beautiful imagery drawn from country life, going on, for example, after the above stanza in the following lines, which are quite in Vaughan's manner :

Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings;
And till prepared for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.

There is, however, more of minute painting in his descriptions of Nature than is common in Vaughan, whose imagination delighted in the wild uncultivated scenery of streams and hills; whereas Marvell loved the artificial ornaments of the garden, though he dramatically makes his mowers complain against them thus:

'Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot;
While the sweet fields do lie forgot,
Where willing Nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence,

And fauns and fairies do the meadows till

More by their presence than their skill.

Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,

May, to adorn the gardens, stand;

But howsoe'er the figures do excel,

The gods themselves with us do dwell.

In this feeling for art, and in his exquisite sense of the propriety of words, Marvell is brought nearer to

Herrick than to any other poet of the day. Both had
learned the same lesson from their study of the classics,
but the chaste simplicity of the Republican poet saved
him from the coarseness with which Herrick too often
pollutes his country melodies and feminine flatteries.
Classical Pastoralism was never carried to a higher perfec-
tion of refinement than by Marvell: witness the opening
lines of Damon the Mower, in which the heat and haze
of a summer day seem to dance :-

Hark how the mower Damon sung,
With love of Juliana stung !
While everything did seem to paint
The scene more fit for his complaint:
Like her fair eyes the day was fair,
But scorching like his am'rous care:
Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was,
And withered, like his hopes, the grass.

"O what unusual heats are here,

Which thus our sun-burned meadows fear!

The grasshopper its pipe gives o'er,

And hamstringed frogs can dance no more;
But in the brook the green frog wades,

And grasshoppers seek out the shades;

Only the snake, that kept within,
Now glitters in its second skin."

Of the same class are the beautiful concluding lines of Bermudas, bringing to a close of delightful restfulness the rich harmonies of the pilgrims' hymn :

Thus sang they in the English boat,

An holy and a cheerful note,

And all the way, to guide their chime,

With falling oars they kept the time.

Not less charming in their Euphuistic simplicity are
the verses on The Nymph complaining for the Death of her
Fawn (killed by some passing troopers) :-

It is a wondrous thing how fleet
'Twas on those little silver feet;
With what a pretty skipping grace
It oft would challenge me the race;