"Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops." I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic. Another carefully studied description of Lowell's is this:-- "The robin sings as of old from the limb! The catbird croons in the lilac-bush! Through the dim arbor, himself more dun, Silently hops the hermit thrush." Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is the most pleasing of these poems:-- "Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May." The dandelion is indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of May. It comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its "ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it bloom with the buttercup and the clover:-- "The dandelions and buttercups Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee Stumbles among the clover-tops, And summer sweetens all but me." Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally throughout the whole summer, especially where the grass is kept short, but its proper season, when it "gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the country, some weeks earlier than the tall buttercup and the clover. These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down, touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the clover and the buttercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,-- "The daisies and the buttercups Gild all the lawn." I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to Lowell, as well as to Emerson:-- Emerson rhymes it with bear, Lowell rhymes it with hear, One makes it woodpeckair, The other, woodpeckear. But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it. Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird- song is capable of.