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