"May is a pious fraud of the almanac," complains James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) in "Under the Willows" (1868). Spring seems to have arrived in New England, but then winter suddenly returns, "like crazy Lear," carrying the dead spring in his arms, "her budding breasts and wan dislustred front / With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard / All overblown." He retreats into his study, "warmly walled with books," where his "wood-fire supplies the sun's defect / Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams." Sheltered against the unexpected cold outside and comforted by his blazing fireplace inside, the speaker takes a book off his "happy shelf" and creates his own springtime indoors, reading "vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods / Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year" (Complete Poetical Works, p. 383). Never mind that Chaucer's "sweet-showered" April must have been invention, too, a shivering Englishman's memory of...