“The services took place in the open air, in the presence of a great assembly.  Prominent among the speakers were Major-General Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, and Major-General Devens.  The wounds of the war were still fresh and bleeding, and the interest of the occasion was deep and thrilling.  The summer afternoon was drawing to its close when the poet began the recital of the ode.  No living audience could for the first time follow with intelligent appreciation the delivery of such a poem.  To be sure, it had its obvious strong points and its sonorous charms; but, like all the later poems of the author, it is full of condensed thought and requires study.  The reader to-day finds many passages whose force and beauty escaped him during the recital, but the effect of the poem at the time was overpowering.  The face of the poet, always singularly expressive, was on this occasion almost transfigured—­glowing, as if with an inward light.  It was impossible to look away from it.  Our age has furnished many great historic scenes, but this Commemoration combined the elements of grandeur and pathos, and produced an impression as lasting as life.”

Of the delivery and immediate effect of the poem Mr. Greenslet says:  “Some in the audience were thrilled and shaken by it, as Lowell himself was shaken in its delivery, yet he seems to have felt with some reason that it was not a complete and immediate success.  Nor is this cause for wonder.  The passion of the poem was too ideal, its woven harmonies too subtle to be readily communicated to so large an audience, mastered and mellowed though it was by a single deep mood.  Nor was Lowell’s elocution quite that of the deep-mouthed odist capable of interpreting such organ tones of verse.  But no sooner was the poem published, with the matchless Lincoln strophe inserted, than its greatness and nobility were manifest.”

The circumstances connected with the writing of the ode have been described by Lowell in his private letters.  It appears that he was reluctant to undertake the task, and for several weeks his mind utterly refused to respond to the high duty put upon it.  At last the sublime thought came to him upon the swift wings of inspiration.  “The ode itself,” he says, “was an improvisation.  Two days before the commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible—­that I was dull as a door-mat.  But the next day something gave me a jog, 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.”