Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/199

Rh courtly poetry—qualified by a graver Puritan spirit —is Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), the son of the clerical headmaster of Hull Grammar School. Educated at Cambridge—where he passed through some religious vicissitudes—he travelled abroad, and on his return became tutor to Lord Fairfax's daughter (1650-52), at Nunappleton House in Yorkshire. It was here that he wrote, though they were not published till much later, lyrical verses which have links with the courtly poems of Waller, the religious poetry of Vaughan, and Jonson's Horatian eulogies of great men and praises of a country life. His political satires were written later, and are discussed in the next volume.

Marvell's poetry is unequal, but at its best it bears the mark of a singularly potent and poetic individuality. No verses are more familiar from anthologies than his noble Horatian ode on Cromwell, the imaginatively phrased To His Coy Mistress, especially the lines beginning

"But at my back I always hear                 Time's winged chariot hurrying near";

and the richly descriptive Upon Appleton House, The Fawn, and the Bermudas. Marvell's treatment of nature has been compared to Vaughan's. It seems to me much more entirely descriptive and decorative. He speaks once of "Nature's mystic book," but it is in introducing an elaborate compliment to his pupil as the source of Nature's beauty. That is not Vaughan's manner.