[13] In a letter written to Mr. R. W. Gilder, 7 February, 1887, Lowell says: “I spent the night with my friend Norton last Wednesday. There I found a pile of the N. A. R.... By the way the January, ’64, number was ‘second edition.’ I fancy the old lady making her best curtsey at being thus called out before the footlights. The article was reprinted as a political tract and largely circulated. Lincoln wrote a letter to the publishers which I forgot to look for.” [14] The fairy story was “Gold-Egg: a Dream Fantasy,” which appeared in the _Atlantic_ for May, 1865. [15] _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, i. 345, 346. Copyrighted 1893, by Harper & Brothers. Mrs. S. B. Herrick, whose friendship with Lowell will be referred to later, writes: “I was speaking to Mrs. Lowell of my strong admiration for its fire and eloquence, and she told me that after Mr. Lowell had agreed to deliver the poem on that occasion, he had tried in vain to write it. The last evening before the date fixed, he said to her: ‘I must write this poem to-night. Go to bed and do not let me feel that I am keeping you up, and I shall be more at ease.’ He began it at ten o’clock. At four in the morning he came to her door and said: ‘It is done and I am going to sleep now.’ 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 523 lines in the space of six hours.” [16] Lowell writes again of this and makes proposed changes and additions in a letter to Col. T. W. Higginson, 28 March, 1867. See _Letters_, i. 379. [17] There was a curious psychical incident connected with the delivery of the Ode which came to light afterward but apparently was not recorded till several years later. The incident is fully set forth in two letters to Dr. William James, which were published in the _Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research_, March, 1889, where Dr. Royce printed a “Report of the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments.” The first letter is from the gentleman in whose experience the incident occurred:-- MY DEAR MR. JAMES,--I passed the night before commemoration day on a lounge in Hollis 21, the room of my college chum H., who had been tutor since our graduation, three years before. I woke (somewhat early, I should say) saying to myself these words: “And what they dare to dream of dare to die for.” I was enough awake to notice the appropriateness of the words to the occasion, but was sleepy enough to wonder whether they really expressed a lofty thought, or were lofty only in sound. Before I had made up my mind I dropped to sleep again.