A whole civilization resides in these lines:-- Pallida Mors æqua pulsat pede pauperumb tabernas, Regumque turris. . . . And not only Horace but Catullus himself:-- Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, Nox est perpetua una dormienda. The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus's Latin; but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive and penetrates greater depths than Horace's. A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of Marvell's poem have something like a syllogistic relation to each other. After a close approach to the mood of Donne, then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity . . . The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace, the conclusion, Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron gates of life. It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit; but it may not be evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the successive images ("my _vegetable_ love," "till the conversion of the Jews"), but this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cowley or Cleveland, for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious idea. In this it is superior to the fancy of "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," or the lighter and less successful poems of Keats. In fact, this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to identify. It is found in Le squelette était invisible Au temps heureux de l'art païen! of Gautier, and in the _dandysme_ of Baudelaire and Laforgue. It is in the poem of Catullus which has been quoted, and in the variation by Ben Jonson:-- Cannot we deceive the eyes Of a few poor household spies? 'Tis no sin love's fruits to steal, But that sweet sin to reveal, To be taken, to be seen, These have sins accounted been. It is in Propertius and Ovid. It is a quality of a sophisticated literature; a quality which expands in English literature just at the moment before the English mind altered; it is not a quality which we should expect Puritanism to encourage. When we come to Gray and Collins, the sophistication remains only in the language, and has disappeared from the feeling. Gray and Collins were masters, but they had lost that hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying clairvoyance), leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious comprehension; it leads to the point of the _Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main_ of Bouvard and Pécuchet.