66

"THE WILLOWs," as was pointed out in the introductory note to An Indian-Summer Reverie, was a clump of trees not far from Elmwood. Lowell took a peculiar pleasure in their gnarled and umbrageous forms, and wrote to Fields while the volume which took its title from the trees was in press : My heart was almost broken yesterday by seeing nailed to my willow a board with these words on it, "These trees for sale.' The wretch is going to peddle them for firewood! If I had the money, I would buy the piece of ground they stand on to save them the dear friends of a lifetime. They would be a loss to the town. But what can one do? They belong to a man who values them by the cord. I wish Fenn had sketched them at least. One of them I hope will stand a few years yet in my poem but he might just as well have outlasted me and my works, making his own green ode every summer." Not all the trees have been destroyed, for some yet remain, and it is a pleasure to record the refusal of a new comer into the neighborhood to have one destroyed which was inconveniently near the site of the house she was to build. She changed, instead, the site.

The varying minds Lowell was in regarding the title of the volume may be learned from the following letter to C. E. Norton, dated

night I fairly ended my work. . . . I had decided to put the "June Idyl" in the forefront and call it "A June Idyl, and Other Poems." But Fields told me that Whittier's new volume was to be called "A Summer Idyl" - so I was blocked there. Then I took "Appledore," merely because it was a pretty name, though I did not wish to put that in the van. So it was all settled for the second time. Then I was suddenly moved to finish my "Voyage to Vinland," . . . and, as I liked the poem, thought no title so good as "The Voyage to Vinland, and Other Poems." But Fields would not hear of it, and proposed that I should rechristen the Idyl "Elmwood," and name the book after that. But the more I thought of it the less I liked it. It was throwing my sanctuary open and making a showhouse of my hermitage. It was indecent. So I fumed and worried. I was riled. Then it occurred to me that I had taken the name of "June Idyl" as a pis-aller, because in my haste I could think of nothing else. Why not name it over? So I hit upon "Under the Willows," and that it is to be. But it is awfully depressing work. They call back so many moods, and they are so bad. I think, though, there is a suggestion of something good in them at least, and they are not silly. But how much the public will stand! I sometimes wonder they don't drive all us authors into a corner and make a battue of the whole concern at once.

...

Pipe blown through by the warm wild breath of the West

Shepherding his soft droves of fleecy cloud, Gladness of woods, skies, waters, all in one,

The bobolink has come, and, like the soul
Of the sweet season vocal in a bird,
Gurgles in ecstasy we know not what
Save June! Dear June! Now God be
praised for June.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac,
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with
eastern wind;

Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,
And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
The season need but turn his hour-glass
round,

And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear, Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms,

Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front

With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard

All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books,

While my wood-fire supplies the sun's defect,

Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams, I take my May down from the happy shelf

Where perch the world's rare song-birds in

a row,

Waiting my choice to open with full breast, And beg an alms of springtime, ne'er denied

Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods

Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year.

July breathes hot, sallows the crispy fields, Curls up the wan leaves of the lilac-hedge, And every eve cheats us with show of clouds That braze the horizon's western rim, or hang

Motionless, with heaped canvas drooping idly,

Like a dim fleet by starving men besieged, Conjectured half, and half descried afar, Helpless of wind, and seeming to slip back Adown the smooth curve of the oily sea.

But June is full of invitations sweet, Forth from the chimney's yawn and thriceread tomes

To leisurely delights and sauntering thoughts

That brook no ceiling narrower than the blue.

The cherry, drest for bridal, at my pane Brushes, then listens, Will he come? The bee,

All dusty as a miller, takes his toll

Of powdery gold, and grumbles. What a day

To sun me and do nothing! Nay, I think
Merely to bask and ripen is sometimes
The student's wiser business; the brain
That forages all climes to line its cells,
Ranging both worlds on lightest wings of
wish,

Will not distil the juices it has sucked

To the sweet substance of pellucid thought, Except for him who hath the secret learned To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take

The winds into his pulses. Hush! 't is he!

My oriole, my glance of summer fire,
Is come at last, and, ever on the watch,
Twitches the packthread I had lightly
wound

About the bough to help his housekeeping,

Twitches and scouts by turns, blessing his luck,

Yet fearing me who laid it in his way,
Nor, more than wiser we in our affairs,
Divines the providence that hides and helps.
Heave, ho! Heave, ho! he whistles as the
twine

Slackens its hold; once more, now! and a

flash

Lightens across the sunlight to the elm Where his mate dangles at her cup of

felt.

Nor all his booty is the thread; he trails My loosened thought with it along the air,

And I must follow, would I ever find The inward rhyme to all this wealth of life.

I care not how men trace their ancestry, To ape or Adam: let them please their whim;

But I in June am midway to believe

Of our New World subduers lingers yet Hereditary feud with trees, they being (They and the red-man most) our fathers' foes,

Is one of six, a willow Pleiades, The seventh fallen, that lean along the brink

Where the steep upland dips into the marsh, Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing,

Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank.

The friend of all the winds, wide-armed he towers

And glints his steely aglets in the sun,
Or whitens fitfully with sudden bloom
Of leaves breeze-lifted, much as when a
shoal

Of devious minnows wheel from where a pike

Lurks balanced 'neath the lily-pads, and whirl

A rood of silver bellies to the day.
Alas! no acorn from the British oak

Wiser than this, to spend in all things

else,

But of old friends to be most miserly. Each year to ancient friendships adds a ring,

As to an oak, and precious more and more, Without deservingness or help of ours, They grow, and, silent, wider spread, each year,

Their unbought ring of shelter or of shade. Sacred to me the lichens on the bark, Which Nature's milliners would scrape away;

Most dear and sacred every withered limb! 'T is good to set them early, for our faith Pines as we age, and, after wrinkles come, Few plant, but water dead ones with vain

tears.

This willow is as old to me as life;

And under it full often have I stretched,
Feeling the warm earth like a thing alive,
And gathering virtue in at every pore
Till it possessed me wholly, and thought
ceased,

Or was transfused in something to which thought

Is coarse and dull of sense. Myself was lost,

Gone from me like an ache, and what remained

Become a part of the universal joy.

My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree,

Danced in the leaves; or, floating in the

cloud,

Saw its white double in the stream below;
Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy,
Dilated in the broad blue over all.

I was the wind that dappled the lush grass,

The tide that crept with coolness to its

roots,