No More Learning

On the whole, we think
that Marvell's epitaph, strong as the terms of
panegyric are, records little more than the truth ;
and that it was not in the vain spirit of boasting,
but in the honest consciousness of virtue and in-
tegrity, that he himself concludes a letter to one
of his correspondents in the words —

"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem;
Fortunam ex aliis. "



*^* The foregoing notice of Marvell (which is,
on the whole, the best in print,) has been taken
from the Edinburgh Rtview, and is said to have
been written by Mr. Henry Rogers. * The editor
has shortened it by some omissions, and hjvs added
a few notes. He has also given fuller extracts
from MarvelPs prose.

There has been no edition of MarvelFs poems
since 1776, and that seems to have retained the
blunders of the three previous editions, beside
adding a few of its own. If it were possible to
reverse the author's meaning by any ingenuity
of punctuation, the occasion seems never to have
been neglected. In the present edition, all the

* Poole's Index to Periodical Literature.



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NOTICE OF THE AUTHOR. lili

more apparent errors have been corrected, and
some advance made toward a pure text. The
poems were never published, or at any rate, col-
lected, by the author himself.

The intellect of Marvell was a remarkably
compact and sincere one, and his habitual charac-
ter was that of prudence and upnghtness. But
whenever he surrendered himself to his tempera-
ment, his mind sought relief in wit, so sportful
and airy, yet at the same time so recondite, that
it is hard to find anywhere an instance in which
the Court, the Tavern, and the Scholar*s Study
are blended with such Ck)rinthian justness of
measure. Nowhere is there so happy an exam-
ple of the truth that wit and fancy are diflferent
operations of the same principle. The wit is
so spontaneous and so interfused with feeling,
that we can scarce distinguish it from fancy ;
and the fancy brings together analogies so remote
that they give us the pleasurable shock of wit.
Now and then, in his poems, he touches a deeper
vein, but shuns instinctively the labour of laying
it open, and escapes gleefully into the more con-
genial sunshine. His mind presents the rare
combination of wit with the moral sense, by which
the one is rescued from scepticism and the other
from prosing. His poems form the synthesis of
Donne and Butler.



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POEMS



SEVERAL OCCASIONS.



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POEMS.



UPON THE HILL AND GROVE AT BILL-
BOROW.

TO THE LORD FAIRFAX.

See how the arched earth does here

Rise in a perfect hemisphere !

The stifiest compass could not strike

A line more circular and like,

Nor softest pencil draw a brow

So equal as this hill does bow ;

It seems as for a model laid,

And that the world by it was made.

Here learn, ye mountains more unjust.

Which to abrupter greatness thrust.

Which do, with your hook-shoulder'd height^

The earth deform, and heaven fright,

For whose excrescence, ill designed.

Nature must a new centre find.

Learn here those humble steps to tread.

Which to securer glory lead.



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TnE POEMS.