It was a quarter of a century since Lowell had collected his fugitive poems, though he had meantime published the second series of “The Biglow Papers,” and when 1868 came in he was moved to make a new volume which should include the poems he had been printing, chiefly in the _Atlantic_. It was with this in mind that he took up a fragment of a poem written a score of years before, rewrote and added to it, designing to make it the title poem in the volume. He printed it first in the June _Atlantic_, under the title “A June Idyll.” In sending it he wrote to Mr. Fields: “In the first flush of having just finished and copied it (for which I was obliged to miss Dickens last night) I am inclined to think there is something characteristic.... Surely there are good bits in it, and it is good for more than usual, or good for nothing. If I haven’t made a spoon, I have certainly spoiled a horn that would have turned out a very good one. You sometimes find fault with my names. I have called this ‘A June Idyll,’ which is just what it is. Do you object?” Mr. Fields, either himself or through a friend, wrote a very appreciative notice of the poem in the _Boston Advertiser_, which drew from Lowell this response to his friendly editor:-- “Such a notice of my Iddle Met my eyes in the _Advertiser_! “‘To order,’ thought I, ’no, fiddle! ’Tis the dull world growing wiser. “‘My forehead they twine with bayses, They’re eager to shout hosanna, My style as pure epic they praises Where they used to add acuanha.’ “‘’Tis always their fate whom at christening Your genuine Helicon’s spilt on; Long ears are the latest at listening, _Vide_ Wordsworth _passim_ on Milton.’ “So I read it aloud to my family, One delicate phrase after t’other, And surely the good little Sammle he Wasn’t sadder at leaving his mother “Than I when I came to the close of it, For I wanted, as I’m a sinner, (Such poetry seemed in the prose of it) To keep up my reading till dinner. “But now, oh worst of collapses, My Temple of Fame is in ruins, Its forecourt, nave, transept, and apse is A shelter for foxes and bruins! “For all of my Public Opinion With the wind in its sails to drive it To the port of supreme dominion Turns out most especially private. “My Fame’s accoucheur sadly yields his Place up to the Deputy Cor’ner, For my Public Opinion was Fields’s, My tradewind a puff from the ‘Corner.’”