‘Under the Old Elm’ is a magnificent tribute to a man so great that there is need of odes like this to help us comprehend his greatness. After calling up the scene when Washington, ‘a stranger among strangers,’ stood beneath that legendary tree to take command of his army, ‘all of captains,’ a motley rout, valorous deacons, selectmen, and village heroes among others, more skilled in debating their orders than obeying them, good fighters all, but ‘serious drill’s despair,’—the poet chants those beautiful lines in which is drawn the distinction between ‘Nation’ and ‘Country.’ The one is fashioned of computable things, good each in its kind and important in its place:—
But Country is a shape of each man’s mind
Sacred from definition, unconfined
By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind;
An inward vision, yet an outward birth
Of sweet familiar heaven and earth;
A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind
Of wings within our embryo being’s shell
That wait but her completer spell
To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare