strength!

And again, having had visions, and having begun to breathe a new atmosphere, with Sinai in view, he says,

two of the grandest lines to be found anywhere, out of the Hebrew.

But grandeur and strength were never his characteristics; the natural tendency of the man was toward the harmonious, the loving, and the beautiful, as in the following lines from the title-page of his poem, "By J. Pierpont, Esquire":—

About this time it was, just before he went off to Baltimore, that we began to have occasional glimpses of that inward fire shut up in his bones, that subterranean sunshine, that golden ore, which, smelted as the constellations were, makes what men have agreed to call poetry,—which, after all, is but another name for inspiration; although the very first outbreak I remember happened at the celebration already referred to, where men saw

and began to breathe freely once more; and the shout of "Glory, glory! Alleluiah!" went up like the roar of many waters from all the cities of our land, as if they themselves had been delivered from the new Sennacherib; yet, after a short season of rest, like one of our Western prairies after having been over-swept with fire, he began to flower anew, and from his innermost nature, like some great aboriginal plant of our Northern wilderness suddenly transferred to a tropical region, roots and all, by some convulsion of nature,—by hurricane, or drift, or shipwreck. And always thereafter, with a very few brief exceptions, instead of echoing and re-echoing the musical thunders of a buried past,—instead of imitating, oftentimes unconsciously (the worst kind of imitation, by the way, for what can be hoped of a man whose individuality has been tampered with, and whose own perceptions mislead him?)—instead of counterfeiting the mighty minstrels he had most reverenced, and oftentimes ignorantly worshipped, as among the unknown gods, in his unquestioning, breathless homage, he began to look upward to the Source of all inspiration, while

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

and therefore Pierpont began his "Portrait" with

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:—

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:—

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,

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

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.

Instead of being a teetotaler, he was hardly what the temperance men of our day would call a temperance man; for he had wine upon his table when he gave dinners, and never shrank from the interchange of courtesies, nor refused a pledge,—though I did, even then. Yet more, as brandy had been prescribed for Mrs. Pierpont by the family physician, Dr. Randall, her husband used