Or of the hayfield roughly mown, into which the herd has been turned to graze: And what below the scythe increast, Is pinched yet nearer by the beast. The mower's work, begun and ended with the dews, in all its charming monotony, seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Marvell; he recurs to it in more than one poem. I am the mower Damon, known Through all the meadows I have mown; On me the morn her dew distils Before her darling daffodils. And again, of the mowers, Who seem like Israelites to be Walking on foot through a green sea. To them the grassy deeps divide And crowd a lane to either side. The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure--and here lies the charm--are not those of Nature in her sublimer or more elated moods, but the gentler and more pastoral elements, that are apt to pass unnoticed at the time by all but the true lovers of the quiet country side, and crowd in upon the mind when surfeited by the wilder glories of peak and precipice, or where tropical luxuriance side by side with tropical aridity blinds and depresses the sense, with the feeling that made Browning cry from Florence, Oh, to be in England, now that April's there! Marvell's lines, "On the Hill and Grove at Billborow," are an instance of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after antithesis and strangeness, it is true, but the spirit underlies the lines. The poem however must be read in its entirety to gain the exact impression. Again, for simple felicity, what could be more airily drawn than the following from "The Garden"?-- 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 doth glide, There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets and claps its silver wings. Or this, from the Song to celebrate the marriage of Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell, of the undisturbed dead of night?-- The astrologer's own eyes are set, And even wolves the sheep forget; Only this shepherd, late and soon, Upon this hill outwakes the moon. Hark! how he sings with sad delight Through the clear and silent night. Other poems, such as the "Ode on the Drop of Dew" and the "Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," too long to be quoted here, are penetrated with the same essence. At the same time it must be confessed that Marvell's imagery is sometimes at fault--it would be strange if it were not so; he falls now and then, the wonder is how rarely, to a mere literary conceit. Thus the mower Damon sees himself reflected in his scythe; the fawn feeds on roses till its lip "seems to bleed," not with a possibly lurking thorn, but with the hue of its pasturage. With Hobbinol and Tomalin for the names of swain and nymph unreality is apt to grow. When the garden is compared to a fortress and its scents to a salvo of artillery--