The little brook: In a letter written in December, 1848, Lowell
James Russell Lowell
says: "Last night I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new
moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page's evening
landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the hill
just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around
me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which
runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in
_Sir Launfal_ was drawn from it." See the poem _Beaver Brook_
(originally called _The Mill_), and the winter picture in _An
Indian-Summer Reverie_, lines 148-196.