Once more, in writing to the same correspondent in 1877, with regard to the versification, he says: “My problem was to contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, which should vary with varying moods, in which the transitions (including those of the voice) should be managed without jar. I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those in the choruses of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ which are in the main masterly. Of course Milton _deliberately_ departed from that stricter form of the Greek Chorus to which it was bound as much (I suspect) by the law of its musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. I wrote some stanzas of the ‘Commemoration Ode’ on this theory at first, leaving some verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased with the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo, rather than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet was grateful by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint reminiscence of consonance.”[17] The ode did at once assert its high character, yet it must be borne in mind that the very reason of its form acted somewhat against its immediate popularity. It is truly an ode to be recited, and as a chorus depends for its power upon a volume of sound, so this ode needs, to bring out its full value, a great delivery. Lowell himself, always a sympathetic reader, had no such power of recitation as would at once convey to his audience a notion of the stateliness and procession of words which attaches to the ode. The impression of the hour was produced by the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of Phillips Brooks in prayer. “That,” says President Eliot, “was the most impressive utterance of a proud and happy day. Even Lowell’s Commemoration Ode did not at the moment so touch the hearts of his hearers; that one spontaneous and intimate expression of Brooks’s noble spirit convinced all Harvard men that a young prophet had risen up in Israel.”[18]