THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 23

committed linnets," daunted the eighteenth century. Nevertheless,
it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored;
happily, because Lovelace would not have the word "confined" twice
in this little poem.


A HORATIAN ODE


"He earned the glorious name," says a biographer of Andrew Marvell
(editing an issue of that poet's works which certainly has its
faults), "of the British Aristides." The portly dulness of the
mind that could make such a phrase, and having made, award it, is
not, in fairness, to affect a reader's thought of Marvell himself
nor even of his time. Under correction, I should think that the
award was not made in his own age; he did but live on the eve of
the day that cumbered its mouth with phrases of such foolish burden
and made literature stiff with them. Andrew Marvell's political
rectitude, it is true, seems to have been of a robustious kind; but
his poetry, at its rare best, has a "wild civility," which might
puzzle the triumph of him, whoever he was, who made a success of
this phrase of the "British Aristides." Nay, it is difficult not
to think that Marvell too, who was "of middling stature, roundish-
faced, cherry-cheeked," a healthy and active rather than a
spiritual Aristides, might himself have been somewhat taken by
surprise at the encounters of so subtle a muse. He, as a garden-
poet, expected the accustomed Muse to lurk about the fountain-
heads, within the caves, and by the walks and the statues of the
gods, keeping the tryst of a seventeenth century convention in
which there were certainly no surprises. And for fear of the
commonplaces of those visits, Marvell sometimes outdoes the whole
company of garden-poets in the difficult labours of the fancy. The
reader treads with him a "maze" most resolutely intricate, and is
more than once obliged to turn back, having been too much puzzled
on the way to a small, visible, plain, and obvious goal of thought.

And yet this poet two or three times did meet a Muse he had hardly
looked for among the trodden paths; a spiritual creature had been
waiting behind a laurel or an apple-tree. You find him coming away