He confessed in a letter written in the summer of 1875 that he had become a quicker writer in verse and slower in prose than when he was younger. The confession may well have grown out of his experience in writing the two centennial odes for which he was called on this year, that “For the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord Bridge,” and that “Read at Cambridge on the Hundredth Anniversary of Washington’s Taking Command of the American Army, 3rd July, 1775.” Both were very nearly improvisations, the former being written in the two days before the celebration, and the latter at short notice after Dr. Holmes could not be had. The lyrical character of the Concord ode makes it sing a little more quickly to the ear of youth, and I think that while there are in it slight allusions to the dead Hawthorne and Thoreau, there is also a faint echo of the living Emerson. It would be strange indeed if Lowell, called thus to celebrate the fight which had already been celebrated in the noblest patriotic hymn in our literature, had not had the vision of Emerson before him as he wrote. What Emerson, who must have been present, said of the ode we do not know, but in a letter written after “Under the Old Elm” had been delivered and printed, Lowell quotes his comment on the second Ode. “I went,” he says, “to club on Saturday and nominated----, whom Emerson seconded. Longfellow was there and James and Quincy and Dr. Howe and Carter and Charlie L. and I. We had a very jolly club and good talk. Emerson was tenderly affectionate. He praised my Cambridge poem, saying that when he began it he said: ‘Why, he hasn’t got his genius on, but presently I found the tears in my eyes.’” Into the second Ode Lowell put more thought and rose to the height of his great theme, for he was able to look at his country from the vantage-ground of the personality of Washington, and he read in the great past an augury of the future which for the moment at least did not vex his anxious mind. “I took advantage of the occasion,” he wrote to a correspondent who was Southern born, “to hold out a hand of kindly reconciliation to Virginia. I could do it with the profounder feeling, that no family lost more than mine by the civil war. Three nephews (the hope of our race) were killed in one or other of the Virginia battles, and three cousins on other of those bloody fields.”