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!