conceits of this period to the influence of Dr. Donne is but a poor excuse after all.  The worst thing that can be said against poetry is that there is so much tedium in it.  The glorious moments are all too few.  It is his honest recognition of this woeful fact that makes Dr. Johnson, with all his faults lying thick about him, the most consolatory of our critics to the ordinary reading man.  “Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults....  Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover.  We are seldom tiresome to ourselves....  Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it” (Lives of the Poets.  Under Prior—­see also under Butler).

That Marvell is never tiresome I will not assert.  But he too has his glorious moments, and they are all his own.  In the whole compass of our poetry there is nothing quite like Marvell’s love of gardens and woods, of meads and rivers and birds.  It is a love not learnt from books, not borrowed from brother-poets.  It is not indulged in to prove anything.  It is all sheer enjoyment.

“Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines, Curb me about, ye gadding vines, And oh, so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place!  But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through. ...  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.”

No poet is happier than Marvell in creating the impression that he made his verses out of doors.

    “He saw the partridge drum in the woods;
    He heard the woodcock’s evening hymn;
    He found the tawny thrush’s broods,
    And the shy hawk did wait for him. 
    What others did at distance hear
    And guessed within the thicket’s gloom
    Was shown to this philosopher,
    And at his bidding seemed to come.”

(From Emerson’s Wood Notes.)

Marvell’s immediate fame as a true poet was, I dare say, obscured for a good while both by its original note (for originality is always forbidding at first sight) and by its author’s fame as a satirist, and his reputation as a lover of “liberty’s glorious feast.”  It was as one of the poets encountered in the Poems on Affairs of State (fifth edition, 1703) that Marvell was best known during the greater part of the eighteenth century.  As Milton’s friend Marvell had, as it were, a side-chapel in the great Miltonic temple.  The patriotic member of Parliament, who refused in his poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby’s proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite quality of his garden-poetry was recognised.  There was a cult for Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell’s name was on the list of its professors.  Wordsworth’s sonnet has preserved this tradition for us.