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.
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