[1] “Take up arms against a sea of troubles.”
[2] “The Pocket Celebration of the Fourth,” in the Atlantic for August, 1858, and “A Sample of Consistency,” in the same for November, 1858.
[3] Letters, i. 307-309.
[4] James Jackson Lowell.
[5] William Lowell Putnam.
[6] It was very likely after reading this poem that Emerson wrote in his diary, 17 January, 1862: “We will not again disparage America now that we have seen what men it will bear. What a certificate of good elements in the soil, climate, and institutions is Lowell, whose admirable verses I have just read! Such a creature more accredits the land than all the fops of Carolina discredit it.”
[7] See Letters, i. 318.
[8] Eight years later, when writing in his happiest mood the paper “A Good Word for Winter,” the memory of these boys came back with the suggestion of snow-forts, and tears trembled in the passage which slipped from his pen.
[9] Letters, i. 343.
[10] In an interesting letter to J. B. Thayer (Letters, ii. 191), Lowell says, comparing his odes with those of Gray and Coleridge: “All these were written for the closet—and mine for recitation. I chose my measures with my ears open. So I did in writing the poem on Rob Shaw. That is regular because meant only to be read, and because also I thought it should have in the form of its stanza something of the formality of an epitaph.”