Near the close of 1849 Lowell reissued in two volumes, under the imprint of W. D. Ticknor & Co., the two series which had appeared in 1843 and 1847, and thus registered himself, as it were, among the regular vine-growers on the slopes of Parnassus. Moreover, with his former products thus formally garnered, he began to please himself with the prospect of some more thoroughgoing piece of poetical composition. He was practically clear of his regular engagement with the _Standard_, and his “Biglow Papers” had given him the opportunity to free his mind in an exhilarating fashion on the supreme question of the hour. There was something of a rebound from this in “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” but the free use of the Yankee vernacular with the immediate popularity which it secured must have set him thinking of the possibility of using this form in some freer and more genuinely poetic fashion. The little pastoral, “The Courtin’,” published in a fragmentary form, was an experiment in this direction at once highly successful, and accordingly we find him writing to Mr. Briggs on the eve of the publication of his two volumes of Poems: “I think you will find my poems improved in the new edition. I have not altered much, but I have left out the poorest and put others in their places. My next volume, I think, will show an advance. It is to be called ‘The Nooning.’ Now guess what it will be. The name suggests pleasant thoughts, does it not? But I shall not tell you anything about it yet, and you must not mention it.” And a few weeks later, with the project still high in his mind, he wrote to the same correspondent: “Maria invented the title for me, and is it not a pleasant one? I am going to bring together a party of half a dozen old friends at Elmwood. They go down to the river and bathe, and then one proposes that they shall go up into a great willow-tree (which stands at the end of the causey near our house, and has seats in it) to take their nooning. There they agree that each shall tell a story or recite a poem of some sort. In the tree they find a countryman already resting himself, who enters into the plan and tells a humorous tale, with touches of Yankee character and habits in it. _I_ am to read my poem of the ‘Voyage of Leif’ to Vinland, in which I mean to bring my hero straight into Boston Bay, as befits a Bay-state poet. Two of my poems are already written--one ‘The Fountain of Youth’ (no connection with any other firm), and the other an ‘Address to the Muse’ by the Transcendentalist of the party. I guess I am safe in saying that the first of these two is the best thing I have done yet. But you shall judge when you see it. But ‘Leif’s Voyage’ is to be far better.” The scheme thus formed intended clearly a group of poems lightly tied together: indeed the plan, always a favorite one, was carried out on very nearly the same lines by Mr. Longfellow in his “Tales of a Wayside Inn” a dozen years later, and it