Journalist and editor, Samuel Carter Hall (1800–89) collected and published ‘the most perfect specimens of the Poets’ up to Prior in his first Book of Gems. Interestingly, he included one example from Spenser, three from Milton, four from Marvell, and ten from Donne. In the biographical portion, he adds to the romantic legends: Marvell ‘was flattered and threatened, watched by spies, waylaid by ruffians, tempted by women and by gold. In vain!’
For Edgar Allan Poe's review of the volume in 1836, see No. 54.
Extract from the Book of Gems (1836), p. 264.
His genius was as varied as it was remarkable. In this volume he occupies a loved and respected place as an exquisite and tender poet—elsewhere he may stand in the first and very highest rank, facile princeps,1 as an incorruptible patriot, the best of controversialists, and the leading prose wit of England. His are the ‘first sprightly runnings’ [Dryden, Aureng-zebe IV.i] of that glorious stream of wit, which will bear upon it down to the latest posterity the names of Swift, Steele, and Addison. Before the time of Marvell,
to be witty was to be forced, strained, and conceited. From him wit first came sparkling forth untouched with baser matter. It was like his personal character. Its main feature was an open clearness. Mean detraction or sordid jealousy never for an instant stained it. He turned aside in the midst of an exalted panegyric to Oliver Cromwell, to say the finest things that have ever been said of Charles I.—he left for a while his own wit in the Rehearsal Transposed [sic], to praise the wit of [Samuel] Butler, his rival and political enemy [RT I, p. 22]. As a poet Andrew Marvell was true, and this is the grand point in poetry. He was not of the highest order, not perhaps in even a high order, but what he did was genuine. It is sweetness speaking out in sweetness. In the language there is nothing more exquisitely tender than the ‘Nymph complaining for the loss of her Fawn.’ Such poems as this and ‘the Bermudas’ may live, and deserve to live, as long as the longest and the mightiest. Of as real a quality are the majority of the poems of Marvell. In a playful and fantastic expression of tender and voluptuous beauty, they are well nigh unrivalled. His fancy indeed some times overmasters him, but it is always a sweet and pleasant mastery. His strong love of the actual at times bursts forth, but his poetry still survives it, and will not be fairly clogged and over-laden with the body corporate.
1 From Edmund Waller's epitaph: inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps: among poets easily the foremost of his time (The Poems, ed. G.Thorn Drury [1904], I, p. lxix).