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.

Instead of being a teetotaler, he was hardly what the temper