XXIX.  NAPOLEON AT REST. (146)

John Pierpont, 1785-1866, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale College in 1804.  The next four years he spent as a private tutor in the family of Col.  William Allston, of South Carolina.  On his return, he studied law in the law school of his native town.  He entered upon practice, but soon left the law for mercantile pursuits, in which he was unsuccessful.  Having studied theology at Cambridge, in 1819 he was ordained pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church, in Boston, where he continued nearly twenty years.  He afterwards preached four years for a church in Troy, New York, and then removed to Medford, Massachusetts.  At the age of seventy-six, he became chaplain of a Massachusetts regiment; but, on account of infirmity, war soon obliged to give up the position.  Mr. Pierpont published a series of school readers, which enjoyed a well-deserved popularity for many years.

His poetry is smooth, musical, and vigorous.  Most of his pieces were written for special occasions. ###

His falchion flashed along the Nile;
  His hosts he led through Alpine snows;
O’er Moscow’s towers, that blazed the while,
  His eagle flag unrolled,—­and froze. 
Here sleeps he now, alone!  Not one
  Of all the kings, whose crowns he gave,
Bends o’er his dust;—­nor wife nor son
  Has ever seen or sought his grave.

Behind this seagirt rock! the star,
  That led him on from crown to crown,
Has sunk; and nations from afar
  Gazed as it faded and went down. 
High is his couch;—­the ocean flood,
  Far, far below, by storms is curled;
As round him heaved, while high he stood,
  A stormy and unstable world.

Alone he sleeps!  The mountain cloud,
  That night hangs round him, and the breath
Of morning scatters, is the shroud
  That wraps the conqueror’s clay in death. 
Pause here!  The far-off world, at last,
  Breathes free; the hand that shook its thrones,
And to the earth its miters cast,
  Lies powerless now beneath these stones.

Hark! comes there from the pyramids,
  And from Siberian wastes of snow,
And Europe’s hills, a voice that bids
  The world he awed to mourn him?  No: 
The only, the perpetual dirge
  That’s heard there is the sea bird’s cry,—­
The mournful murmur of the surge,—­
  The cloud’s deep voice, the wind’s low sigh.

Note.—­Seagirt rock, the island of St. Helena, is in the Atlantic Ocean, nearly midway between Africa and South America.  Napoleon was confined on this island six years; until 1821, when he died and was buried there.  In 1841, his remains were removed to Paris.

XXX.  WAR. (148)