[Illustration: _Facsimile of Mr. Lowell’s handwriting_] with the cold, salt sea over him instead of the warm exulting blue of ether. I am gone under, and I never will be a fool again.... Like a boy, I mistook my excitement for inspiration, and here I am in the mud. You see, also, I am a little disappointed and a little few (un petit peu) vexed. I did _not_ make the hit I expected, and am ashamed at having been again tempted into thinking I could write _poetry_, a delusion from which I have been tolerably free these dozen years.”[15] There was one other comment made by Lowell on the ode which confirms these impressions and adds a little to the record of his experience in writing it. It occurs in a letter to J. B. Thayer, 8 December, 1868, upon the occasion of a review by Mr. Thayer of the volume of verse just published in which the ode was included: “I am not sure if I understand what you say about the tenth strophe. You will observe that it leads naturally to the eleventh, and that I there justify a certain narrowness in it as an expression of the popular feeling as well as my own. I confess I have never got over the feeling of wrath with which (just after the death of my nephew Willie) I read in an English paper that nothing was to be hoped of an army officered by tailors’ apprentices and butcher boys. The poem was written with a vehement speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor’s gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb, and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it. I was longer in getting the new (eleventh) strophe to my mind than in writing the rest of my poem. In _that_ I hardly changed a word, and it was so undeliberate that I did not find out till after it was printed that some of the verses lacked corresponding rhymes.[1]... I had put the ethical and political view so often in prose that I was weary of it. The motives of the war? I had impatiently urged them again and again,--but for an ode they must be in the blood and not the memory. One of my great defects (I have always been conscious of it) is an impatience of mind which makes me contemptuously indifferent about arguing matters that have once become convictions.”