"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."