Well shot, ye firemen! O how sweet And round your equal fires do meet-- and, Then in some flower's beloved hut Each bee as sentinel is shut, And sleeps so, too--but if once stirred, She runs you through, nor asks the word-- here, in spite of a certain curious felicity, we are in the region of false tradition and rococo expression. The poem of "Eyes and Tears," again (so whimsically admired by Archbishop Trench), is little more than a string of conceits; and when in "Mourning" we hear that She courts herself in amorous rain, Herself both Danae and the shower; when we are introduced to Indian divers who plunge in the tears and can find no bottom, we think of Macaulay's "Tears of Sensibility," and Crashaw's fearful lines on the Magdalene's eyes-- Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans. Nevertheless Marvell's poems are singularly free as a rule from this strain of affectation. He has none of the morbidity that often passes for refinement. The free air, the wood-paths, the full heat of the summer sun--this is his scenery; we are not brought into contact with the bones beneath the rose-bush, the splintered sun-dial, and the stagnant pool. His pulses throb with ardent life, and have none of the "inexplicable faintness" of a deathlier school. What would not Crashaw have had to say of the "Nuns of Appleton" if he had been so unfortunate as to have lighted on them? But Marvell writes: Our orient breaths perfumed are With incense of incessant prayer, And holy water of our tears Most strangely our complexion clears; Not tears of Grief, but such as those With which calm Pleasure overflows. And passing by a sweet and natural transition to his little pupil, the young Recluse of Nunappleton-- I see the angels, in a crown, On you the lilies showering down, And, round about you, glory breaks, That something more than human speaks The poems contain within themselves the germ of the later growth of satire in the shape of caustic touches of humour, as well as a certain austere philosophy that is apt to peer behind the superficial veil of circumstance, yet without dreary introspection. There is a Dialogue between Soul and Body, which deals with the duality of human nature which has been the despair of all philosophers and the painful axiom of all religious teachers. Marvell makes the Soul say: Constrained not only to endure Diseases, but what's worse, the cure, And ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwrecked into health again. In the same connection in "The Coronet," an allegory of the Ideal and the Real, he says: Alas! I find the serpent old, Twining in his speckled breast, About the flowers disguised doth fold, With wreaths of fame and interest.