p>The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 / A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
JOHN PIERPONT
Most men of "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and who, like Lear, have been "mightily abused" in their day, are found, upon diligent inquiry, to have long outlived themselves, like the Archbishop of Granada; but here is a man, or was but the other day, in his eighty-second year, with the temper and edge and "bright blue rippling glitter" of a Damascus blade up to the very last; or rather, considering how he was last employed, with the temper of that strange tool, found among the ruins of Thebes, with which they used to smooth and polish their huge monoliths of granite, until they murmured a song of joy, whenever the morning sunshine fell upon them.
This remarkable man—remarkable under many aspects—died at Medford, Massachusetts, on Monday morning, August 27th; and it is now said of heart-disease,—that other name for a mysterious and sudden death, happen how it may, and when it may. He had been perfectly well the day before, attended church, and called on some of his neighbors; he retired to rest as usual, and nothing more was heard of him till Monday morning, when he was found asleep in Jesus, prepared, as we humbly trust, to hear the greeting of "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!" Says a friend, in a letter now lying before me, of August 27th: "On Saturday afternoon, day before yesterday, your friend and my friend, Rev. John Pierpont, called upon me, and we had a very interesting interview of about an hour. I never saw him look better or appear happier. Although eighty-one years of age the 6th of last April, he seemed to have the elasticity of youth, and he was perfectly erect. I gave him what he wanted very much,—a copy of his trial before an ecclesiastical council in this city, several years ago. He gave me his photograph, and, taking his gold pen, wrote underneath, in a beautiful hand, 'John Pierpont, aged 81.' He said he was doing some work at Washington, which he hoped to live long enough to complete.... When I published my last book, I sent him a copy. He acknowledged the receipt of it in a letter of eight or ten pages, which is now a treasure to me. His name on the photograph was probably the last time he ever wrote it,"—another treasure, which my friend would not now be likely to part with for any consideration.
My acquaintance with Mr. Pierpont began in the fall or winter of 1814, just when the war had assumed such proportions, that men's hearts were failing them for fear, and prodigies and portents were of daily occurrence. New England too—finding herself defenceless and left to the mercy of our foe—began to think, not of setting up for herself, not of withdrawing from the copartnership, without the consent of the whole sisterhood, but of coming together for conference and proposing to the general government, not to become neutral after the fashion of Kentucky, in our late misunderstanding, not of playing the part of umpire between the belligerents, like that heroic embodiment of Southern chivalry, nor of holding the balance of power, but, on being allowed her just proportion of the public revenues, to undertake for herself, and agree to give a good account of the enemy, if he should throw himself upon her bulwarks, whether along the seaboard, or upon her great northern frontier.
He had just escaped from Newburyport, after writing the "Portrait," a severe and truthful picture of the times, which went far to give him a national reputation—for the day; and opened a law office at 103 Court Street, Boston, where he found nothing to do, and spent much of his time in cutting his name on little ivory seals, and engraving ciphers—"J.P."—so beautiful in their character, and so graceful, that one I have now before me, an impression taken by him in wax, with a vermilion bed,—for in all such matters he was very particular,—were enough to establish any man's reputation as a seal engraver. It bears about the same relationship to what are called ciphers, that Benvenuto Cellini's flower-cups bore to the clumsy goblets of his day.
He was never a great reader, not being able to read more than fifty pages of law and miscellany in a day, though he managed, for once, while a tutor in Colonel Alston's family at Charleston, South Carolina, beginning by daylight and continuing as long as he could see, in midsummer, to get through with one hundred pages of Blackstone; but the "grind" was too much for him,—he never tried it again. He read Gibbon, and Chateaubriand's "Genius of Christianity," and St. Pierre, and Jeremy Bentham's "Theory of Rewards and Punishments," but never to my knowledge a novel, a romance, or a magazine article, except an occasional review; but Joanna Baillie,—that female Shakespeare of a later age,—and Beattie, and Campbell, and the British poets, and dramatic writers, were always at hand, when he had nothing better to do, with no seals to cut, no ciphers, no razor-strops, no stoves, and no clients. Over that field of enchantment and illusion he wandered with lifted wings, month after month, and year after year.
At this time he was in his thirtieth year, and I in my twenty-second. No two persons were ever more unlike; and yet we grew to be intimate friends after a while; and at the time of his death our friendship had lasted more than fifty years, with a single interruption of a twelvemonth or so while I was abroad, which was put an end to by our letters of reconciliation crossing each other almost on the same day.
With a young family on his hands, precarious health and a feeble constitution, as we then believed, which drove him to Saratoga every two or three years, and no property, what had he to look forward to, unless he could manage to go through a course of starvation at half-price, or diet with the chameleons?—though great things were expected of him by those who knew him best, and the late Mr. Justice Story could not bear to think of his abandoning the profession, so long as there was a decent chance of living through such a course of preparation.
After all that he has done as a poet, as a preacher, as a reformer, and as a lecturer, I must say that I think he was made for a lawyer. Vigorous and acute, clear-sighted, self-possessed, and logical to a fault, if he had not married so early, or if a respectable inheritance had fallen to him, after he had learned to do without help or patronage, as Dr. Samuel Johnson did, while undergoing Lord Chesterfield, he might have been at the head of the Massachusetts bar,—a proud position, to be sure, at any time within the last fifty years,—or, at any rate, in the foremost rank, long before his death.
He had, withal, a great fondness for mechanics, and one at least of his inventions, the "Pierpont or Doric Stove," was a bit of concrete philosophy,—a miniature temple glowing with perpetual fire,—a cast-iron syllogism of itself, so classically just in its proportions, and so eminently characteristic, as to be a type of the author. He had been led through a long course of experiment in the structure of grates and stoves, and in the consumption of fuel, with the hope of superseding Saratoga, for himself at least, by making our terrible winters and our east winds a little more endurable. No man ever suffered more from what people sometimes call, without meaning to be naughty, damp cold weather.
In addition to the "Portrait," he had written a New-Year's Address or two, and a fine lyric, which was said or sung—I forget which—at the celebration of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow; so that after he went off to Baltimore, and the "Airs of Palestine" appeared in 1816, those who knew him best, instead of being astonished like the rest of the world, regarded it as nothing more than the fulfilment of a promise, and went about saying, or looking as if they wanted to say, "Didn't we tell you so?"
And yet, with the exception of two or three outbreaks and flashes, there was really nothing in his earlier manifestations to prefigure the "unrolling glory" of the "Airs," or to justify the extravagant expectations people had entertained from the first, if you would believe them.
Robert Treat Paine having disappeared from the stage, there was nobody left but Lucius Manlius Sargent and John Pierpont for celebrations and sudden emergencies. But Sargent never tried the heroic, and was generally satisfied with imitations of Walter Scott, and others, who were given to oddities and quaintness. For example, "I thought," says he, in the longest poem he ever wrote, which appeared in quarto,—
"I thought, than as a feather fair
More light is filmy gossamer,
So woman's heart is lighter far
Than lightest breath of summer air,
Which is so light it scarce can bear
The
