style="font-size:15px;"> While Mr. Pierpont flung himself abroad—like Handel, over the great organ-keys at Haarlem—as if he never knew before what legs and arms were good for, after the following fashion:—
"The misty hall of Odin
With mirth and music swells,
Rings with the harps and songs of bards,
And echoes to their shells.
"See how amid the cloud-wrapped ghosts
Great Peter's awful form
Seems to smile,
As the while,
Amid the howling storm,
He hears his children shout, Hurrah!
Amid the howling storm," etc., etc.
Few men ever elaborated as he did,—not even Rousseau, when he wrote over whole pages and chapters of his "Confessions," I forget how many times. Fine thoughts were never spontaneous with him, never unexpected, never unwaited for,—never, certainly till long after he had got his growth. In fact, some of the happiest passages we have seem to be engraved, letter by letter, instead of being written at once, or launched away into the stillness, like a red-hot thunderbolt. Well do I remember a little incident which occurred in Baltimore, soon after the failure of Pierpont and Lord—and Neal, when we were all dying of sheer inaction, and almost ready to hang ourselves—in a metaphorical sense—as the shortest way of scoring off with the world.
We were at breakfast,—it was rather late.
"Where on earth is your good husband?" said I to Mrs. Pierpont.
"In bed, making poetry," said she.
"Indeed!"
"Yes, flat on his back, with his eyes rolled up in his head."
Soon after, the gentleman himself appeared, looking somewhat the worse for the labor he had gone through with, and all the happier, that the throes were over, and the offspring ready for exhibition. "Here," said he, "tell me what you think of these two lines,"—handing me a paper on which was written, with the clearness and beauty of copperplate,
"Their reverend beards that sweep their bosoms wet
With the chill dews of shady Olivet."
"Charming," said I. "And what then? What are you driving at?"
"Well, I was thinking of Olivet, and then I wanted a rhyme for Olivet; and rhymes are the rudders, you know, according to Hudibras; and then uprose the picture of the Apostles before me,—their reverend beards all dripping with the dews of night."
How little did he or I then foresee what soon followed,—soon, that is, in comparison with all he had ever done before! The "Airs of Palestine," like the night-blooming cereus,—the century-plant,—flowering at last, and all at once and most unexpectedly too, after generations have waited for it, as for the penumbra of something foretold, until both their patience and their faith have almost failed. But, from the very first, there were signs of growth not to be mistaken,—of inward growth, too,—and oftentimes an appearance of slowly gathered strength, as if it had been long husbanded, and for a great purpose. For example,—
"There the gaunt wolf sits on his rock and howls,
And there, in painted pomp, the savage Indian prowls."
What a picture of brooding desolation! How concentrated and how unpretending, in its simplicity and strength!
And again, having had visions, and having begun to breathe a new atmosphere, with Sinai in view, he says,
"There blasts of unseen trumpets, long and loud,
Swelled by the breath of whirlwinds, rent the cloud,"—
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":—
"I love to breathe where Gilead sheds her balm;
I love to walk on Jordan's banks of palm;
I love to wet my foot in Hermon's dews;
I love the promptings of Isaiah's muse;
In Carmel's paly grots I'll court repose,
And deck my mossy couch with Sharon's deathless rose."
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
"The Desolator desolate, the Victor overthrown,
The Arbiter of others' fate a suppliant for his own,"
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
"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
