This line read originally: "There is no price set," etc. The next
James Russell Lowell
line began with "And."
32-95. This rapturous passage descriptive of June is unquestionably
the most familiar and most celebrated piece of nature poetry in our
literature. It is not only beautiful and inspiring in its felicitous
phrasings of external nature, but it is especially significant as a
true expression of the heart and soul of the poet himself. It was
always "the high-tide of the year" with Lowell in June, when his
spirits were in fine accord with the universal joy of nature. Wherever
in his poetry he refers to spring and its associations, he always
expresses the same ecstasy of delight. The passage must be compared
with the opening lines of _Under the Willows_ (which he at first named
_A June Idyll_):
"June is the pearl of our New England year.
Still a surprisal, though expected long,
Her coming startles. Long she lies in wait,
Makes many a feint, peeps forth, draws coyly back,
Then, from some southern ambush in the sky,
With one great gush of blossom storms the world," etc.
And in _Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line_ the coming of spring is
delightfully pictured:
"Our Spring gets everything in tune
An' gives one leap from April into June," etc.
In a letter written in June, 1867, Lowell says: "There never _is_ such
a season, and that shows what a poet God is. He says the same thing
over to us so often and always new. Here I've been reading the same
poem for near half a century, and never had a notion what the
buttercup in the third stanza meant before."
It is worth noting that Lowell's happy June corresponds to May in the
English poets, as in Wordsworth's _Ode_:
"With the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday."
In New England where "Northern natur" is "slow an' apt to doubt,"
"May is a pious fraud of the almanac."
or as Hosea Biglow says:
"Half our May is so awfully like May n't,
'T would rile a Shaker or an evrige saint."