225. Virgilium vidi tantum: I barely saw Virgil—caught a glimpse of him—a phrase applied to any passing glimpse of greatness.
227. Undine-like: Undine, a graceful water nymph, is the heroine of the charming little romantic story by De la Motte Fouqué.
234. The village blacksmith: See Longfellow's famous poem, The Village Blacksmith. The chestnut was cut down in 1876. An arm-chair made from its wood still stands in the Longfellow house, a gift to Longfellow from the Cambridge school children.
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.