32-95. This rapturous passage descriptive of June is unquestionably the most familiar and most celebrated piece of nature poetry in our literature. It is not only beautiful and inspiring in its felicitous phrasings of external nature, but it is especially significant as a true expression of the heart and soul of the poet himself. It was always "the high-tide of the year" with Lowell in June, when his spirits were in fine accord with the universal joy of nature. Wherever in his poetry he refers to spring and its associations, he always expresses the same ecstasy of delight. The passage must be compared with the opening lines of _Under the Willows_ (which he at first named _A June Idyll_): "June is the pearl of our New England year. Still a surprisal, though expected long, Her coming startles. Long she lies in wait, Makes many a feint, peeps forth, draws coyly back, Then, from some southern ambush in the sky, With one great gush of blossom storms the world," etc. And in _Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line_ the coming of spring is delightfully pictured: "Our Spring gets everything in tune An' gives one leap from April into June," etc. In a letter written in June, 1867, Lowell says: "There never _is_ such a season, and that shows what a poet God is. He says the same thing over to us so often and always new. Here I've been reading the same poem for near half a century, and never had a notion what the buttercup in the third stanza meant before." It is worth noting that Lowell's happy June corresponds to May in the English poets, as in Wordsworth's _Ode_: "With the heart of May Doth every beast keep holiday." In New England where "Northern natur" is "slow an' apt to doubt," "May is a pious fraud of the almanac." or as Hosea Biglow says: "Half our May is so awfully like May n't, 'T would rile a Shaker or an evrige saint." 41. The original edition has "grasping" instead of "groping." 42. Climbs to a soul, etc.: In his intimate sympathy with nature, Lowell endows her forms with conscious life, as Wordsworth did, who says in _Lines Written in Early Spring_: "And 't is my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes." So Lowell in _The Cathedral_ says: "And I believe the brown earth takes delight, In the new snow-drop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could transmute her darkness into pearl." So again he says in _Under the Willows_: "I in June am midway to believe A tree among my far progenitors, Such sympathy is mine with all the race, Such mutual recognition vaguely sweet There is between us." It must be remembered that this humanizing of nature is an attitude toward natural objects characteristic only of modern poetry, being practically unknown in English poetry before the period of Burns and Wordsworth.