Six old willows: These much-loved trees afforded Lowell a
James Russell Lowell
subject for a later poem _Under the Willows_, in which he describes
particularly one ancient willow that had been spared, he "knows not by
what grace" by the ruthless "New World subduers"--
"One of six, a willow Pleiades,
The seventh fallen, that lean along the brink
Where the steep upland dips into the marsh."
In a letter written twenty years after the _Reverie_ to J.T. Fields,
Lowell says: "My heart was almost broken yesterday by seeing nailed to
_my_ willow a board with these words on it, 'These trees for sale.'
The wretch is going to peddle them for firewood! If I had the money, I
would buy the piece of ground they stand on to save them--the dear
friends of a lifetime."