254.  Six old willows:  These much-loved trees afforded Lowell a 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.”

255.  Paul Potter:  One of the most famous of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, notable for the strong realism of his work.

264.  Collegisse juvat:  The full sentence, in the first ode of Horace, reads, “Curriculo pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat.” (It is a pleasure to have collected the dust of Olympus on one’s chariot wheels.) The allusion is to the Olympic games, the most celebrated festival of Greece.  Lowell puns upon the word collegisse with his own coinage, which may have the double meaning of going to college and collecting.

272.  Blinding anguish:  An allusion to the death of his little daughter Blanche.  See The Changeling, The First Snow-fall, and She Came and Went.

THE OAK

11.  Uncinctured front:  The forehead no longer encircled with a crown.

13-16.  There is a little confusion in the figures here, the cathedral part of the picture being a little far fetched.

40.  Mad Pucks:  Puck is the frolicsome, mischief-making spirit of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

45.  Dodona grove:  The grove of oaks at Dodona was the seat of a famous Greek oracle, whose responses were whispered through the murmuring foliage of the trees.

BEAVER BROOK

Beaver Brook at Waverley was a favorite resort of Lowell’s and it is often mentioned in his writings.  In summer and winter it was the frequent goal of his walks.  The poem was at first called The Mill.  It was first published in the Anti-Slavery Standard, and to the editor, Sidney H. Gay, Lowell wrote:—­“Don’t you like the poem I sent you last week?  I was inclined to think pretty well of it, but I have not seen it in print yet.  The little mill stands in a valley between one of the spurs of Wellington Hill and the main summit, just on the edge of Waltham.  It is surely one of the loveliest spots in the world.  It is one of my lions, and if you will make me a visit this spring, I will take you up to hear it roar, and I will show you ’the oaks’—­the largest, I fancy, left in the country.”

21.  Undine:  In mythology and romance, Undine is a water-spirit who is endowed with a soul by her marriage with a mortal.  The race is the watercourse conducted, from the dam in an open trough or “penstock” to the wheel.