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!
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.
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