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
from such a divine ambush a wilder and a simpler man. All his
garden had been made ready for poetry, and poetry was indeed there,
but in unexpected hiding and in a strange form, looking rather like
a fugitive, shy of the poet who was conscious of having her rules
by heart, yet sweetly willing to be seen, for all her haste.

The political poems, needless to say, have an excellence of a
different character and a higher degree. They have so much
authentic dignity that "the glorious name of the British Aristides"
really seems duller when it is conferred as the earnings of the
Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland than when it
inappropriately clings to Andrew Marvell, cherry-cheeked, caught in
the tendrils of his vines and melons. He shall be, therefore, the
British Aristides in those moments of midsummer solitude; at least,
the heavy phrase shall then have the smile it never sought.

The Satires are, of course, out of reach for their inordinate
length. The celebrated Satire on Holland certainly makes the
utmost of the fun to be easily found in the physical facts of the
country whose people "with mad labour fished the land to shore."
The Satire on "Flecno" makes the utmost of another joke we know of-