But the period to which we owe almost all the true gold among his poems, is the two years which he spent at Nunappleton House, 1650-1652, as tutor to the daughter of the great Lord Fairfax, the little Lady Mary Fairfax, then twelve years old. Marvell was at this time twenty-nine; and that exquisite relation which may exist between a grown man, pure in heart, and a young girl, when disparity of fortune and circumstance forbids all thought of marriage, seems to have been the mainspring of his song. Such a relation is half tenderness which dissembles its passion, and half worship which laughs itself away in easy phrases. The lyric "Young Love," which indubitably though not confessedly refers to Mary Fairfax, is one of the sweetest poems of pure feeling in the language. Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for love. Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, doth prize As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice. Now then love me; Time may take Thee before thy time away; Of this need we'll virtue make, And learn love before we may. It is delightful in this connection to think of the signet-ring with the device of a fawn,--which he used in early life and may still be seen on his papers,--as a gift of his little pupil, earned doubtless by his poem on the Dying Fawn, which is certainly an episode of Lady Mary's childhood. In this group of early poems, which are worth all the rest of Marvell's work put together, several strains predominate. In the first place there is a close observation of Nature, even a grotesque transcription, with which we are too often accustomed only to credit later writers. For instance, in "Damon the Mower" he writes: 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. The second line of this we take to refer to the condition to which frogs are sometimes reduced in a season of extreme drought, when the pools are dry. Marvell must have seen a frog with his thighs drawn and contracted from lack of moisture making his way slowly through the grass in search of a refreshing swamp; this is certainly minute observation, as the phenomenon is a rare one. Again, such a delicate couplet as, And through the hazels thick espy The hatching throstle's shining eye, is not the work of a scholar who walks a country road, but of a man who will push his way into the copses in early spring, and has watched with delight the timorous eye and the upturned beak of the thrush sunk in her nest. Or again, speaking of the dwindled summer stream running so perilously clear after weeks of drought that the fish are languid: The stupid fishes hang, as plain As flies in crystal overta'en,