Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVIII.--DECEMBER, 1866.--NO. CX.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR
AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
District of Massachusetts.

[Transcriber's note: Minor typos corrected and footnotes moved to end of
article.]

* * * * *

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 filmiest thread of gossamer," etc., etc., etc.

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 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.

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 to take his brandy and water with her sometimes, just
before dinner, by way of a "whet."

Again: he had been brought up, like St. Paul, at the very feet of
Gamaliel. He was born Orthodox,--he lived Orthodox,--he sat for years
under the preaching of Dr. Lyman Beecher, whom he looked upon as a
"giant among pygmies,"--and well he might, as a metaphysician and as a
controversialist, if not as a theologian,--and was, I have lately been
told, a member of Dr. Spring's Orthodox church at Newburyport, before
his removal to Boston. But once there, in that overcharged atmosphere,
he took a pew in the Brattle Street Unitarian church,--without being
then a Unitarian, or dreaming of the great change that was to follow
within two or three years,--and was a regular attendant under the
preaching of Mr. Everett up to the last. On his removal to Baltimore, he
swung round again toward Orthodoxy,--that Orthodoxy which has been so
wittily defined as _my_ doxy, while heterodoxy is _your_ doxy,--and sat
for three years under the preaching of Dr. Ingals, the highly gifted
gentleman to whom he dedicated his poem--_in blank_--when it first
appeared, being perhaps a little afraid of committing himself in
advance; and then, at the very first gathering of the Baltimore
Unitarians in a large auction-room, which led to the organization of a
church within a few months, the erection of a beautiful building, and to
the settlement of our friend, the late Dr. Jared Sparks, he came out
fair and square upon the great question, and led, or helped lead, the
exercises. The result of which was, that in due time, after his failure
in business, he became a student of theology at Cambridge, and within a
year was called to the ministry of reconciliation over Hollis Street
Church, as a successor to Mr. Holly, at that time a most captivating
preacher, with a congregation and church eminently fastidious and
exacting, and not easily satisfied; yet Mr. Pierpont labored with them
and for them over twenty-five years, with an earnestness, a
comprehensiveness, and a faithfulness, for which some of them have not
forgiven him to this day. He entered upon the ministry there in April,
1819, and resigned in 1845; when he became the first pastor of a
Unitarian church in Troy, remained there four years, and then took
charge of a church in Medford; where he was living when the Rebellion
broke out, and he entered the army as chaplain, under an express
stipulation that the regiment was _not to go round Baltimore_.

But I am fully justified in saying that, when I first knew him in
Boston, he did not know himself. He had entirely mistaken his vocation,
and was about the last man in the world to enter into trade, though
pre-eminently fitted for business, if he had been properly
encouraged,--the business of law certainly, and the business of
statesmanship. He saw nothing of what was before him,--nothing of the
field he was to occupy till the Master came,--nothing of the influence,
nothing of the authority, he was to exercise over the minds and hearts
of men,--and nothing of that huge oriflamme which was coming up slowly,
to be sure, but certainly, over the distant verge of an ever-widening
horizon. He was utterly discouraged as a lawyer; he knew nothing of
business; he had no capital; and what on earth was he good for? Whither
should he go? What undertake?

And yet he bore up manfully through all this discouragement, and no word
of complaint or murmuring ever escaped his lips. On the whole, he was
one of the most truly conscientious men I ever knew,--and why not one
of the most truly religious, notwithstanding his obnoxious faith?--so
even-tempered that I never saw him disturbed more than once or twice in
all my life, and so patient under wrong that one could hardly believe in
his withering sarcasm, and scorching indignation when he took the field
as a reformer, "in golden panoply complete."

Let me now describe his personal appearance, for the help of those who
have only heard of the man. He was tall, straight, and spare,--six feet,
I should say, and rather ungraceful in fact, though called by the women
of his parish, not only the most graceful, but the most finished of
gentlemen. That he was dignified, courteous, and prepossessing, very
pleasant in conversation, a capital story-teller, and a tolerable--no,
intolerable--punster, exceedingly impressive both in the pulpit and
elsewhere, when much in earnest, and in after life a great lecturer and
platform speaker, I am ready to acknowledge; but he wanted ease of
manner--the readiness and quiet self-possession of a high-bred man, who
cannot be taken by surprise, and is neither afraid of being
misunderstood nor afraid of letting himself down--till after he had
passed the age of threescore.

The first impression he made on me was that of a country schoolmaster,
or of a professor, on his good behavior, who had got his notions of the
polite world from Chesterfield; though, when I knew him better, and
learned that he had been a tutor in the Alston family of South Carolina,
I detected the original type of his perpendicularity, serious composure,
and stateliness,--the archetype. I was constantly reminded of John C.
Calhoun, a fellow-student with him at Yale, and a man he always
mentioned, with a strange mixture of admiration and awe, as if he
thought him an offshoot from the Archfiend himself, "skilled to make the
worse appear the better reason." His tall figure, his erect, positive
bearing, and somewhat uncompromising, severe expression of countenance,
when much in earnest, with black, heavy eyebrows, clear blue eyes which
passed for black, and stiff black hair, were all of that Huguenot
Southern type, which, like the signs of the Scotch Covenanter or of the
old English Puritan, are as unlikely to die out as the Canada thistle,
where they who sow the wind are content to reap the whirlwind. In their
steadfast pertinacity, whether right or wrong, in their adamantine
logic, as unyielding as death, and calm, serious energy of action, and
in a part of their transcendental theories, they were alike; and alike,
too, in their tried honesty. The great Nullifier and the great Reformer
were both Titanic, in the vastness and comprehensiveness of their views,
in their unrelenting self-assertion, in their metaphysics, and in their
theories of government. If the dark Southron made open war upon his
country till it grew to be unsafe, the dark Northerner would tear the
Constitution of that country to tatters, and trample it under foot, as
he did upon one occasion, without remorse or compunction, because it was
held by others to give property in man, though for himself he denied
that it did so, or that it sanctioned slavery in any shape,--as he did,
I say, though I was not an eyewitness of the outrage, and have only the
report from others who were. If it was only a flourish, like that of
Edmund Burke, when he suddenly lugged out the dagger before the upturned
smiling eyes of his patient compeers, and Sheridan--or was it
Fox?--begged the gentleman to tell him where the _fork_ was to be had
which belonged to the knife, why, even that were not only unworthy of
the man, but so utterly unlike him, for he never indulged in rhetoric or
rhodomontade or claptrap, that one would be inclined to think he was
beside himself, or had been dining out, like Daniel Webster when he
proposed, in the Senate Chamber, to plant our starry banner on the
outermost verge, the Ultima Thule, of our disputed territory, heedless
of consequences. Both Pierpont and Calhoun certainly forgot the
injunction to be "temperate in all things"; and allow me to add, that,
in my judgment, it mattered little who was with, or who against them,
after they had once set the lance in rest, with a windmill in
view,--they only spurred the harder for opposition, and lashed out all
the more vehemently for being cheered, even by the lowliest.
Encouragement and opposition were alike to both, after the rowels were
set, and their beavers closed.

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