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 patriot