46. The single crow, etc.: Note the full significance of this detail of the picture. Compare Bryant's _Death of the Flowers:_ "And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day." 50. Compare with this stanza the pretty little poem, _The Birch Tree._ 68. Lavish of their long-hid gold: The chestnut leaves, it will be remembered, turn to a bright golden yellow in autumn. These descriptions of autumn foliage are all as true as beautiful. 73. Maple-swamps: We generally speak of the swamp-maple, which grows in low ground, and has particularly brilliant foliage in autumn. 82. Tangled blackberry: This is the creeping blackberry of course, which every one remembers whose feet have been caught in its prickly tangles. 91. Martyr oak: The oak is surrounded with the blazing foliage of the ivy, like a burning martyr. 99. Dear marshes: The Charles River near Elmwood winds through broad salt marshes, the characteristic features of which Lowell describes with minute and loving fidelity. 127. Bobolink: If Lowell had a favorite bird, it was the bobolink, although the oriole was a close competitor for his praises. In one of his letters he says: "I think the bobolink the best singer in the world, even undervaluing the lark and the nightingale in the comparison." And in another he writes: "That liquid tinkle of theirs is the true fountain of youth if one can only drink it with the right ears, and I always date the New Year from the day of my first draught. Messer Roberto di Lincoln, with his summer alb over his shoulders, is the true chorister for the bridals of earth and sky. There is no bird that seems to me so thoroughly happy as he, so void of all _arriere pensee_ about getting a livelihood. The robin sings matins and vespers somewhat conscientiously, it seems to me--makes a business of it and pipes as it were by the yard--but Bob squanders song like a poet." Compare the description in _Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line:_ "'Nuff said, June's bridesman, poet o' the year, Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here; Half hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings, Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings, Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair, Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air." See also the opening lines of _Under the Willows_ for another description full of the ecstasy of both bird and poet. The two passages woven together appear in the essay _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, as a quotation. An early poem on _The Bobolink_, delightful and widely popular, was omitted from later editions of his poems by Lowell, perhaps because to his maturer taste the theme was too much moralized in his early manner. "Shelley and Wordsworth," says Mr. Brownell, "have not more worthily immortalized the skylark than Lowell has the bobolink, its New England congener." 134. Another change: The description now returns to the marshes.