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“Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing,
Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank.”

This is exactly the appearance the roots of most trees, when uncovered, present; they flow out from the trunk like diminishing streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it, and pushing their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One principal office of the roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast the earth: hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality of surface; they will fit themselves to the top of a comparatively smooth rock, so as to adhere amazingly, and flow into the seams and crevices like metal into a mould.

Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of his own country. In his “Indian-Summer Reverie” we catch a glimpse of the hen-hawk, silently sailing overhead

“With watchful, measuring eye,”
the robin feeding on cedar berries, and the squirrel,

“On the shingly shagbark’s bough.”

I do not remember to have met the “shagbark” in poetry before, or that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by

“The wide-ranked mowers wading to
the knee,”

as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cutting, though they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass; perhaps this is the explanation of the line.

But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young begins to weigh upon him:–

“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,–