"There blasts of unseen trumpets, long and loud,
Swelled by the breath of whirlwinds, rent the cloud,"--

two of the grandest lines to be found anywhere, out of the Hebrew.

But grandeur and strength were never his characteristics; the natural
tendency of the man was toward the harmonious, the loving, and the
beautiful, as in the following lines from the title-page of his poem,
"By J. Pierpont, _Esquire_":--

"I love to breathe where Gilead sheds her balm;
I love to walk on Jordan's banks of palm;
I love to wet my foot in Hermon's dews;
I love the promptings of Isaiah's muse;
In Carmel's paly grots I'll court repose,
And deck my mossy couch with Sharon's deathless rose."

About this time it was, just before he went off to Baltimore, that we
began to have occasional glimpses of that inward fire shut up in his
bones, that subterranean sunshine, that golden ore, which, smelted as
the constellations were, makes what men have agreed to call
poetry,--which, after all, is but another name for inspiration; although
the very first outbreak I remember happened at the celebration already
referred to, where men saw

"The Desolator desolate, the Victor overthrown,
The Arbiter of others' fate a suppliant for his own,"

and began to breathe freely once more; and the shout of "Glory, glory!