and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night
writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child."
In another letter he says: "The poem was written with a vehement
speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor's
gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb,
and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece
magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it." In a note
in Scudder's biography of Lowell (Vol. II., p. 65), it is stated upon
the authority of Mrs. Lowell that the poem was begun at ten o'clock
the night before the commemoration day, and finished at four o'clock
in the morning. "She opened her eyes to see him standing haggard,
actually wasted by the stress of labor and the excitement which had
carried him through a poem full of passion and fire, of five hundred
and twenty-three lines, in the space of six hours."

Critical estimates are essentially in accord as to the deep
significance and permanent poetic worth of this poem. Greenslet, the
latest biographer of Lowell, says that the ode, "if not his most
perfect, is surely his noblest and most splendid work," and adds:
"Until the dream of human brotherhood is forgotten, the echo of its
large music will not wholly die away." Professor Beers declares it to
be, "although uneven, one of the finest occasional poems in the
language, and the most important contribution which our Civil War has
made to song." Of its exalted patriotism, George William Curtis says:
"The patriotic heart of America throbs forever in Lincoln's Gettysburg
address. But nowhere in literature is there a more magnificent and
majestic personification of a country whose name is sacred to its
children, nowhere a profounder passion of patriotic loyalty, than in
the closing lines of the Commemoration Ode. The American whose heart,
swayed by that lofty music, does not thrill and palpitate with solemn