Nature is thus constantly compelled into admiring submission to some Delia or Phyllis or Chloris. Even further than this do the poets go; they make all the beauty of Nature a direct outcome of the lady’s charms. In the gardens at Penshurst the peace and glory of the alleys was given by Dorothea’s more than human grace.[140] No spot could resist the civilizing effect of her beauty. The most charming example of this sort of fanciful exaggeration is in Marvell’s verses on Maria and the Nunappleton gardens. ’Tis she, that to these gardens gave That wondrous beauty which they have; She straightness on the woods bestows; To her the meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the river be So crystal pure, but only she, She yet more pure, and straight, and fair Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers, are.[141] If later examples of the subordination of Nature to man were so graceful and quaintly tender as this poem of Marvell’s we might simply regard them as permissible instances of pathetic fallacy. But even taken at its best we cannot fail to see that this conception of Nature in its relation to man is quite unlike the dominant conception in the romantic school. In the one case we have the subordination of Nature; in the other the ministry of Nature. A significant comparison might be made between Marvell’s Maria, and Wordsworth’s Lucy.[142] The one is the typical fair maiden ruling over her flower world and inspiring to beautiful life all the gentle Nature forms about her. The other is “Nature’s lady.” Her whole being is molded by her susceptibility to the deeper influences of Nature untouched by art. Maria gives to the external world the charm that it has. Lucy is graced by the spirit of nature with all lovely qualities. But Marvell’s poem is really no fair criterion of the use of Nature in the classical love and elegiac poetry, for in most of that poetry the emotion, the passion, that would justify extravagant or even impossible conceptions is conspicuously absent. The extravagance of speech stood as the sign of an intensity of feeling that did not exist. The poet was not swept away by overwhelming passion. He worked out his verses with conscious deliberation. A lady-love was one of the necessary poetical stage properties, so the poet cast about him for a Phyllis or an Amoret, and then cast about him for something to say to her. Such lines as Waller’s on Dorothea, who is so much admired by the plants that If she sit down, with tops all tow’rds her bow’d, They round about her into arbours crowd: Or if she walks, in even ranks they stand, Like some well-marshal’d and obsequious band,[143]