With Andrew Marvell it is different, though we will show by instances
that even his observation was sometimes at fault. Where or when this
passion came to him we cannot tell; whether in the great walled garden
at the back of the old school-house at Hull, where his boyish years were
spent; at Cambridge, where the oozy streams lapped and green fens
crawled almost into the heart of the town, where snipe were shot and
wild-duck snared on the site of some of its now populous streets; at
Meldreth perhaps, where doubtless some antique kindred lingered at the
old manor-house that still bears his patronymic, "the Marvells."--Wherever
it was,--and such tastes are rarely formed in later years--the delicate
observation of the minute philosopher, side by side with the art of
intimate expression, grew and bloomed.
We see a trace of that leaning nature, the trailing dependence of the
uneasy will of which we have already spoken, in a story of his early
years. The keen-eyed boy, with his fresh colour and waving brown hair,
was thrown on the tumultuous world of Cambridge, it seems, before he was
thirteen years of age; a strange medley no doubt,--its rough publicity
alone saving it, as with a dash of healthy freshness, from the
effeminacy and sentimentalism apt to breed in more sheltered societies.
The details of the story vary; but the boy certainly fell into the hands
of Jesuits, who finally induced him to abscond to one of their retreats
in London, where, over a bookseller's shop, after a long and weary
search, his father found him and persuaded him to return. Laborious Dr.
Grosart has extracted from the Hull Records a most curious letter
relating to this incident, in which a man whose son has been inveigled
away in similar circumstances, asks for advice from Andrew Marvell's
father.
Such an escapade belongs to a mind that must have been ardent and daring
beyond its fellows; but it also shows a somewhat shifting foundation, an
imagination easily dazzled, and a pliability of will that cost us, we
may believe, a poet. After Cambridge came some years of travel, which
afforded material for some of his poems, such as the satire on Holland,
of which the cleverness is still apparent, though its elaborate
coarseness and pedantic humour make it poor pasture to feed the mind
upon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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