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 invocatio