Marvell had been repeatedly threatened with assassination, and hence, when he died suddenly on the 16th of August 1678, it was surmised that he had been removed by poison. The Corporation of Hull voted a sum to defray his funeral expenses, and for raising a monument to his memory; but owing to the interference of the Court, through the rector of the parish, this votive tablet was not at the time erected. He was buried in St Giles-in-the-Fields.
'Out of the strong came forth sweetness,' saith the Hebrew record. And so from the sturdy Andrew Marvell have proceeded such soft and lovely strains as 'The Emigrants,' 'The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn,' 'Young Love,' &c. The statue of Memnon became musical at the dawn; and the stern patriot, whom no bribe could buy and no flattery melt, is found sympathising in song with a boatful of banished Englishmen in the remote Bermudas, and inditing 'Thoughts in a Garden,' from which you might suppose that he had spent his life more with melons than with men, and was better acquainted with the motions of a bee-hive than with the contests of Parliament, and the distractions of a most distracted age. It was said (not with thorough truth) of Milton, that he could cut out a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones—a task which his assistant may be said to have performed in his stead, in his small but delectable copies of verse.
THE EMIGRANTS.
1 Where the remote Bermudas ride,
In the ocean's bosom unespied,
From a small boat that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song.
2 'What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the watery maze,
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own!
3 'Where he the huge sea-monsters racks,
That lift the deep upon their backs;
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storms and prelates' rage.
4 'He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air.
5 'He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night:
* * * * *
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple where to sound his name.
6 'Oh, let our voice his praise exalt
Till it arrive at heaven's vault,
Which then perhaps rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexique bay.'
7 Thus sung they in the English boat,
A holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.