What puzzled me was the link between excelsior, the stuffing or packing material referred to in Victorian and Progressive era novels, and excelsior in
THE shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device--
Excelsior!
(also found in Victorian and Progressive era novels). Turns out the packing material is still available, used in upholsterery and old-fashioned teddy bears. This excelsior is fine wood shavings, especially from Germany. It was originally a trademarked brand name. (One of 's crasser characters is named Ondine or Undine; someone asks her if her parents named her after a mermaid or Rhinemaiden, but no, she assumes they were thinking of a kind of hair pomade.)
Excelsior, the Romantic cry from the Longfellow poem, means "more than excelling"; straightforward derivation.
Romanticism annoys me, but as a early induction to literature it seems very useful. I can quote 's poetry though I don't particularly like it; my grandfather can, though he learned it eighty years ago; and a student I used to tutor, who was painfully learning English in her early adulthood - she came from Somalia - was surprised and pleased that she could follow Longfellow's rhythm and meaning more easily than she could follow looser modern authors. (I was enormously curious what her teachers thought of a paper on Longfellow, but never found out.)
So wrote clew in Word.