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 joy and high resolve does not yet know what it is to be an American.”

With the praise of a discriminating criticism Stedman discusses the ode in his Poets of America:  “Another poet would have composed a less unequal ode; no American could have glorified it with braver passages, with whiter heat, with language and imagery so befitting impassioned thought.  Tried by the rule that a true poet is at his best with the greatest theme, Lowell’s strength is indisputable.  The ode is no smooth-cut verse from Pentelicus, but a mass of rugged quartz, beautiful with prismatic crystals, and deep veined here and there with virgin gold.  The early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt line, ‘weak-winged is song,’ are scarcely firm and incisive.  Lowell had to work up to his theme.  In the third division, ’Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil,’ he struck upon a new and musical intonation of the tenderest thoughts.  The quaver of this melodious interlude carries the ode along, until the great strophe is reached,—­

    Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

in which the man, Abraham Lincoln, whose death had but just closed the national tragedy, is delineated in a manner that gives this poet a preeminence, among those who capture likeness in enduring verse, that we award to Velasquez among those who fasten it upon the canvas.  ’One of Plutarch’s men’ is before us, face to face; an historic character whom Lowell fully comprehended, and to whose height he reached in this great strophe.  Scarcely less fine is his tearful, yet transfiguring, Avete to the sacred dead of the Commemoration.  The weaker divisions of the production furnish a background to these passages, and at the close the poet rises with the invocation,—­

    ‘Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!’

a strain which shows that when Lowell determinedly sets his mouth to the trumpet, the blast is that of Roncesvalles.”