243. When Moses sent men to "spy out" the Promised Land, they reported a land that "floweth with milk and honey," and they "came unto the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff; and they brought of the pomegranates and of the figs" (Numbers xiii.)
245. Compare the familiar line in Gray's Elegy:
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
and Tennyson's line, in the Ode to the Duke of Wellington:
"The path of duty was the way of glory."
In a letter to T.W. Higginson, who was editing the Harvard Memorial Biographies, in which he was to print the ode, Lowell asked to have the following passage inserted at this point:
"Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave,
But through those constellations go
That shed celestial influence on the brave.
If life were but to draw this dusty breath
That doth our wits enslave,
And with the crowd to hurry to and fro,
Seeking we know not what, and finding death,
These did unwisely; but if living be,
As some are born to know,
The power to ennoble, and inspire
In other souls our brave desire
For fruit, not leaves, of Time's immortal tree,
These truly live, our thought's essential fire,
And to the saner," etc.
Lowell's remark in The Cathedral, that "second thoughts are prose," might be fairly applied to this emendation. Fortunately, the passage was never inserted in the ode.
255. Orient: The east, morning; hence youth, aspiration, hope. The figure is continued in l. 271.
262. Who now shall sneer? In a letter to Mr. J.B. Thayer, who had criticized this strophe, Lowell admits "that there is 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." But Lowell asks his critic to observe that this strophe "leads naturally" to the next, and "that I there justify" the sentiment.