Lowell’s explanation of the form of the ode is significant. So native to him was the most genuine literary spirit that he could conceive of the ode and its delivery as one consistent whole without being perturbed by the consideration that he was to deliver it and to a modern audience trained in the reading of poetry, not in the hearing of it. Both the poetic reciter and the recipients were wanting, and the ode remains, a noble piece of declamation indeed for whoever has the great gift of poetic declamation, yet after all as surely to be read and not spoken as Browning’s dramas are to be read and not acted. It is this fine literary sense, penetrating even to a supposititious occasion, which clings to the ode and makes it so far caviare to the general. Yet it would be false indeed to regard such a statement as final. The fire which burned in Lowell’s members, leaving him cold afterward, glows in the great lines, and certain it is that at no other single poem, unless it be Whitman’s “My Captain,” does the young American of the generation born since the war so kindle his patriotic emotions. The sixth stanza was not recited, but was written immediately afterward. It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode that it is difficult to think of it as an afterthought. It is easy to perceive that while the glow of composition and of recitation was still upon him Lowell suddenly conceived this splendid illustration and indeed climax of the utterance of the Ideal which is so impressive in the fifth stanza. So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel. Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans hold of their great President. It was the final expression of the judgment which had slowly been forming in Lowell’s own mind, and when he summed him up in his last line,-- “New birth of our new soul, the first American,” he was honestly throwing away all the doubts which had from time to time beset him, and letting his ardent pursuit of the ideal, his profound faith in democracy as incarnate in his country, centre in this one man.