The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
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.
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 being then a Unitarian, or dreaming of the great change that was to follow within two or three years,—and was a regular attendant under the preaching of Mr. Everett up to the last. On his removal to Baltimore, he swung round again toward Orthodoxy,—that Orthodoxy which has been so wittily defined as my doxy, while heterodoxy is your doxy,—and sat for three years under the preaching of Dr. Ingals, the highly gifted gentleman to whom he dedicated his poem—in blank—when it first appeared, being perhaps a little afraid of committing himself in advance; and then, at the very first gathering of the Baltimore Unitarians in a large auction-room, which led to the organization of a church within a few months, the erection of a beautiful building, and to the settlement of our friend, the late Dr. Jared Sparks, he came out fair and square upon the great question, and led, or helped lead, the exercises. The result of which was, that in due time, after his failure in business, he became a student of theology at Cambridge, and within a year was called to the ministry of reconciliation over Hollis Street Church, as a successor to Mr. Holly, at that time a most captivating preacher, with a congregation and church eminently fastidious and exacting, and not easily satisfied; yet Mr. Pierpont labored with them and for them over twenty-five years, with an earnestness, a comprehensiveness, and a faithfulness, for which some of them have not forgiven him to this day. He entered upon the ministry there in April, 1819, and resigned in 1845; when he became the first pastor of a Unitarian church in Troy, remained there four years, and then took charge of a church in Medford; where he was living when the Rebellion broke out, and he entered the army as chaplain, under an express stipulation that the regiment was not to go round Baltimore.
But I am fully justified in saying that, when I first knew him in Boston, he did not know himself. He had entirely mistaken his vocation, and was about the last man in the world to enter into trade, though pre-eminently fitted for business, if he had been properly encouraged,—the business of law certainly, and the business of statesmanship. He saw nothing of what was before him,—nothing of the field he was to occupy till the Master came,—nothing of the influence, nothing of the authority, he was to exercise over the minds and hearts of men,—and nothing of that huge oriflamme which was coming up slowly, to be sure, but certainly, over the distant verge of an ever-widening horizon. He was utterly discouraged as a lawyer; he knew nothing of business; he had no capital; and what on earth was he good for? Whither should he go? What undertake?
And yet he bore up manfully through all this discouragement, and no word of complaint or murmuring ever escaped his lips. On the whole, he was one of the most truly conscientious men I ever knew,—and why not one of the most truly religious, notwithstanding his obnoxious faith?—so even-tempered that I never saw him disturbed more than once or twice in all my life, and so patient under wrong that one could hardly believe in his withering sarcasm, and scorching indignation when he took the field as a reformer, "in golden panoply complete."
Let me now describe his personal appearance, for the help of those who have only heard of the man. He was tall, straight, and spare,—six feet, I should say, and rather ungraceful in fact, though called by the women of his parish, not only the most graceful, but the most finished of gentlemen. That he was dignified, courteous, and prepossessing, very pleasant in conversation, a capital story-teller, and a tolerable—no, intolerable—punster, exceedingly impressive both in the pulpit and elsewhere, when much in earnest, and in after life a great lecturer and platform speaker, I am ready to acknowledge; but he wanted ease of manner—the readiness and quiet self-possession of a high-bred man, who cannot be taken by surprise, and is neither afraid of being misunderstood nor afraid of letting himself down—till after he had passed the age of threescore.
The first impression he made on me was that of a country schoolmaster, or of a professor, on his good behavior, who had got his notions of the polite world from Chesterfield; though, when I knew him better, and learned that he had been a tutor in the Alston family of South Carolina, I detected the original type of his perpendicularity, serious composure, and stateliness,—the archetype. I was constantly reminded of John C. Calhoun, a fellow-student with him at Yale, and a man he always mentioned, with a strange mixture of admiration and awe, as if he thought him an offshoot from the Archfiend himself, "skilled to make the worse appear the better reason." His tall figure, his erect, positive bearing, and somewhat uncompromising, severe expression of countenance, when much in earnest, with black, heavy eyebrows, clear blue eyes which passed for black, and stiff black hair, were all of that Huguenot Southern type, which, like the signs of the Scotch Covenanter or of the old English Puritan, are as unlikely to die out as the Canada thistle, where they who sow the wind are content to reap the whirlwind. In their steadfast pertinacity, whether right or wrong, in their adamantine logic, as unyielding as death, and calm, serious energy of action, and in a part of their transcendental theories, they were alike; and alike, too, in their tried honesty. The great Nullifier and the great Reformer were both Titanic, in the vastness and comprehensiveness of their views, in their unrelenting self-assertion, in their metaphysics, and in their theories of government. If the dark Southron made open war upon his country till it grew to be unsafe, the dark Northerner would tear the Constitution of that country to tatters, and trample it under foot, as he did upon one occasion, without remorse or compunction, because it was held by others to give property in man, though for himself he denied that it did so, or that it sanctioned slavery in any shape,—as he did, I say, though I was not an eyewitness of the outrage, and have only the report from others who were. If it was only