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!