Baael's stone obscene: Human sacrifices were offered on the
James Russell Lowell
altars of Baael. (_Jeremiah_ xix, 5.)
147-205. This strophe was not in the ode as delivered, but was written
immediately after the occasion, and included in the published poem.
"It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode," says
Scudder, "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.... 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."
In a letter to Richard Watson Gilder, Lowell says: "The passage about
Lincoln was not in the ode as originally recited, but added
immediately after. More than eighteen months before, however, I had
written about Lincoln in the _North American Review_--an article that
pleased him. I _did_ divine him earlier than most men of the Brahmin
caste."
It is a singular fact that the other great New England poets,
Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, had almost nothing to say about
Lincoln.