It was perhaps with one of these phrases lingering in his mind that he characterized Lincoln a few weeks later when he came to write his Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration. This commemoration was held by Harvard College, 21 July, 1865, in honor of its sons who had died in the war. Lowell was asked to write a poem for the occasion, and he has given in a letter written a score of years later, to Mr. Gilder, a bit of reminiscence respecting its composition. “The ode itself,” he says, “was an improvisation. Two days before the commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible--that I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog, and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child. ‘I have something but don’t yet know what it is, or whether it will do. Look at it and tell me.’ He went a little way apart with it under an elm-tree in the College yard. He read a passage here and there, brought it back to me, and said ‘Do? I should think so! Don’t you be scared!’ And I wasn’t, but virtue enough had gone out of me to make me weak for a fortnight after.” Something of this reaction appears in a letter to Miss Norton, written four days after the delivery of the poem: “I eat and smoke and sleep and go through all the nobler functions of a man mechanically still, and wonder at myself as at something outside of and alien to me. For have I not worked myself lean on an ‘Ode for Commemoration?’ Was I not so rapt with the fervor of conception as I have not been these ten years, losing my sleep, my appetite, and my flesh, those attributes to which I before alluded as nobly uniting us in a common nature with our kind? Did I not for two days exasperate everybody that came near me by reciting passages in order to try them on? Did I not even fall backward and downward to the old folly of hopeful youth, and think I had written something _really_ good at last? And am I not now enduring those retributive dumps which ever follow such sinful exaltations, the Erynnyes of Vanity? Did not I make John Holmes and William Story shed tears by my recitation of it (my ode) in the morning, both of ’em fervently declaring it was ‘noble’? Did not even the silent Rowse declare ’twas in a higher mood than much or most of later verse? Did not I think, in my nervous exhilaration, that ’twould be _the_ feature (as reporters call it) of the day? And, after all, have I not a line in the _Daily Advertiser_ calling it a ‘graceful poem’ (or ‘some graceful verses’ I forget which), which ‘was received with applause?’ Why, Jane, my legs are those of grasshoppers, and my head is an autumn threshing-floor, still beating with the alternate flails of strophe and antistrophe, and an infinite virtue is gone out of me somehow--but it seems _not_ into my verse as I dreamed. Well, well, Charles will like it--but then he always does, so what’s the use? I am Icarus now,