Yet if victory did not arouse him, the greater theme of sacrifice called out one of his most solemn and stirring odes, that dedicated to the memory of Robert Gould Shaw, and entitled “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw.” It may well be read in connection with the other poem suggested by the events of the war in 1863, “Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel.” There is in this parable a half confession of failure, a reflection upon ideals once held gallantly and then trailed in the dust of disappointment. He seems to have written the first scene, in which Lincoln is the ideal captain, without at first designing the second, for he writes to Mr. Fields, who already had the first: “I have written a Palinode to ‘Blondel,’ and so made two poems of it. The latter half is half-humorous and, I think, will help the effect. You see how dangerous it is to pay a poet handsomely beforehand. I don’t know where I shall stop. I shall be sending an epic presently.... I should like your notion of the second part of Blondel, which (in the first relief of incubation) I am inclined to think clever. But there was nothing wiser than Horace’s ninth year--only it overwhelms us like a ninth wave (that’s Wendell’s, _tenth_ the Latins said, but I wanted nine), and if we kept our verses so long we should print none of them. A strong argument for monthly magazines, you see.” There is so little of the essentially dramatic about Lowell’s poetry that it is not unfair to hear his voice only slightly changed in such a poem as this. But all such speculative and half-moody expressions gave way before the dignity of Shaw’s death. “I would rather have my name known and blest, as his will be,” Lowell writes to Colonel Shaw’s mother, “through all the hovels of an outcast race, than blaring from all the trumpets of repute.” And the ultimate judgment which he held, despite the confusion wrought by all the meaner passions of the time which vext his soul, rings out clearly in the final lines:-- “Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn, (Thee! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn,) How nobler shall the sun Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air, That thou bred’st children who for thee couldst dare And die as thine have done!”[10] For the one note, in the discord of the war, heard more and more clearly by Lowell, was that of triumph for democracy as incarnate in his country. No one can read his writings from this time forward without observing how deep a passion this love of his country was. In earlier life he had had a passion for Freedom, and the Freedom which was to him as the Lady to her knight, was very comprehensive and took many forms. Now, in his maturity, and when he saw the one great blot fading from the escutcheon, there was a steady concentration of passion upon that incorporation of freedom in the fair land which seemed to his imagination to have gotten her soul, and no longer Earth’s biggest country, but to have