“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,”