Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/661

1866.] unknown gods, in his unquestioning, breathless homage, he began to look upward to the Source of all inspiration, while

Princely visions rare

Went stepping through the air,"

and to walk abroad with all his "singing robes about him," as he had never done before. Hitherto it had been otherwise. Campbell had opened the "Pleasures of Hope" with

Why to yon mountains turns the musing eye,

Whose sunbright summits mingle with the sky?"

and therefore Pierpont began his "Portrait" with

Why does the eye with greater pleasure rest

On the proud oak with vernal honors drest?"

But now, instead of diluting Beattie, with all his "pomp of groves and long resounding shore," and recasting portions of Akenside or Pope, and rehashing "Ye Mariners of England," for public celebrations, or converting Moore himself into "Your glass may be purple and mine may be blue," while urging the claims of what is called Liberal Christianity in a hymn written for the new Unitarian church of Baltimore, he would break forth now and then with something which really seemed unpremeditated,—something he had been surprised into saying in spite of himself, as where he finishes a picture of Moses on Mount Nebo, after a fashion both startling and effective in its abruptness, and yet altogether his own:—

His sunny mantle and his hoary locks

Shone like the robe of Winter on the rocks.

Where is that mantle? Melted into air.

Where is the Prophet? God can tell thee where."

And yet in the day of his strength he was sometimes capable of strange self-forgetfulness, and once wrote, in his reverence for the classic, what, if it were not blasphemy, would be meaningless:—

O thou dread Spirit! being's End and Source!

O check thy chariot in its fervid course;

Bend from thy throne of darkness and of fire,

And with one smile immortalize oar lyre!"

Think of a Christian poet apostrophizing the Ancient of Days—Jehovah himself—in the language of idolatrous and pagan Rome!

At another time,—but these are among the last of his transgressions, and they happened nearly fifty years before his death,—having in view that epitaph on an infant where a father says of his child,

"Like a dewdrop on the early morn

She sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven,"

Mr. Pierpont says of the frozen heart, when religion's "mild and genial ray" falls upon it, with music,

The fire is kindled and the flame is bright;

And that cold mass, with either power assailed,

Is warmed, made liquid, and to heaven exhaled."

And this by a man who talks about "the glow-worm burning greenly on the wall," and the "unrolling glory" of the empyrean, as if he understood what both meant.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding these aberrations, my friend—the truest friend I ever had in my life, on some accounts, for he was not afraid to tell me of my faults when he saw them, and the man after all, to whom I am under greater obligations than to any other, living or dead, for bringing me acquainted with myself—held on his upward course for the last thirty years of his life without faltering, and without any visible perturbation, like the planets, if not like the stars, along their appointed path, never so as to astonish perhaps, but almost always so as to convince, whatever might be the manner of his approach, and whether in prose or poetry.

But we are anticipating. At the time of our first acquaintance, he certainly entertained very different views upon the subjects which have made him so conspicuous within the last twenty-five years.

Instead of being an Abolitionist, or a Garrisonian, and insisting upon immediate, universal, and unconditional emancipation, he was a colonizationist, rather tolerant of the evil, as it existed in the South, and very patient under the wrongs of our black brethren; and so was I.