The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866. Various
he suddenly lugged out the dagger before the upturned smiling eyes of his patient compeers, and Sheridan—or was it Fox?—begged the gentleman to tell him where the fork was to be had which belonged to the knife, why, even that were not only unworthy of the man, but so utterly unlike him, for he never indulged in rhetoric or rhodomontade or claptrap, that one would be inclined to think he was beside himself, or had been dining out, like Daniel Webster when he proposed, in the Senate Chamber, to plant our starry banner on the outermost verge, the Ultima Thule, of our disputed territory, heedless of consequences. Both Pierpont and Calhoun certainly forgot the injunction to be "temperate in all things"; and allow me to add, that, in my judgment, it mattered little who was with, or who against them, after they had once set the lance in rest, with a windmill in view,—they only spurred the harder for opposition, and lashed out all the more vehemently for being cheered, even by the lowliest. Encouragement and opposition were alike to both, after the rowels were set, and their beavers closed.
At the time I speak of, Mr. Pierpont and his brother-in-law, Mr. Joseph L. Lord, kept house together on a street running down hill back of the State-House,—Hancock Street, if I do not mistake. They had always two or three boarders, and sometimes more, and among them Erastus A. Lord, a brother of Joseph, and myself. With these, and with the neighbors,—the whole neighborhood, I might say, and with all their visiting-list,—our friend Pierpont was an oracle from the first, and in the church and parish, after he had been set up in the pulpit, an idol. It was thought presumptuous for anybody to differ with him upon any subject. Whatever he said, or thought, or did, was never to be questioned,—never! His opinions were maxims, his utterances apothegms, his lightest word authority. And the worst of it all, and the hardest thing for me to stomach, was, that in all our controversies, for a long time, if he was not always right, and I always wrong, I was quite sure to come out second best, in the judgment of his friends and worshippers, who had no sympathy for anybody who ventured to tilt with their champion. Nevertheless I persisted, and, not standing much in awe of the pedant and the pedagogue, however much I admired the logician and the poet or the lawyer, I lost no opportunity of asserting my independence, and took, I am afraid, a sort of malicious pleasure in showing that I had views and opinions of my own, and was determined to do my own thinking, come what might. For a while this operated against me,—if not always with Mr. Pierpont, certainly with all his immediate personal friends and family; but in time, I believe, he began to like me the better for my presumption, or foolhardiness, in battling the watch with him, whenever he laid down a proposition, with a calm, dictatorial air, which did not strike me at first either as clearly self-evident, or, after a thorough investigation, as indisputably true, so that I do on my conscience believe that I was fast growing, not only unmanageable, but unbearable.
Mr. Pierpont was no judge of painting, though he relished a good picture, and had no taste for drawing, or rather no talent for drawing, though he saw readily enough certain errors of exaggeration that abounded in the engravings of the day; and I well remember his calling my attention to the preposterously small feet of the female figures for which Messrs. Draper and Company, the bank-note engravers of that day, were so famous; and yet his handwriting was very beautiful, and the ciphers I have mentioned were neither more nor less than exquisite drawings. Nor had he any ear for music, to borrow the language we hear at every turn,—as if all persons who are not deaf by nature had not ears for music, so far as they can hear at all,—or as if he who can distinguish voices, or learn a language, so far as to be understood when he talks it, had not necessarily an ear for music, in other words, an ear for sounds and for the rhythm of speech; but he was deficient in the organ of tune, phrenologically speaking, though I have heard him warble a Scotch air on the flute with uncommon sweetness—and feebleness—without tonguing, and play two or three other tunes, which had been adapted in the choir of his church, upon glass goblets, partly filled with water and set upon a table before him, as if he enjoyed every touch and thrill,—his long, thin fingers travelling over the damp edges of the glass, and bringing forth "Bonnie Doon," or "There's nothing true but Heaven,"—with his cuffs rolled up as if he were driving a lathe, and turning off some of the little thin boxes and other exquisite toys, in wood or ivory, which he was addicted to, about fifteen years ago, in what he called his workshop. Like Johnson, however, and Alexander Pope, who, according to Leigh Hunt,
"Spoiled the ears of the town
With his cuckoo-song verses, two up and two down,"
he must have had "time" large; for the music of his rhythm was absolutely faultless,—cloying indeed, so that he introduced the double rhymes to roughen it, just as he indulged in alliteration, where the "lordly lion leaves his lonely lair," that he might not be supposed incapable of running off upon another track, or into another channel.
But I never heard him sing or try to sing, though he had a deep, manly voice, read as very few are able to read, and his modulation was rich and varied, and very agreeable, both to the understanding and the ear.
His pronunciation was a marvel for correctness. In all our intercourse I never knew him to give a word otherwise than "according to Walker," so long as Walker was the standard with him,—or never but once, when he said cli-mac'ter-ic, instead of cli-mac-ter'ic; and when I remonstrated with him, he lugged out Webster, whom he adhered to forever after. So exceedingly fastidious and sensitive was he, about the time he left Baltimore for Cambridge, that in his desire to give the pure sound of e, as in met, instead of the sound of u, which is so common as to be almost universal where e is followed by r and another consonant, so that person is pronounced purson, he gave a sound which most people misunderstood for pairson, and went away and laughed at, for pedantry and affectation.
So, too, when I first knew him, and for a long time after, he was incapable of making a speech. Even a few sentences were too much for him; and though he argued at least one case to the court, while in business at Newburyport, I am persuaded, from what I afterward knew of him, that he must have done what he did by jerks, or have committed the whole to memory. And this, strange as it may now appear to those who knew him only as a lecturer and platform-speaker, continued long after he had entered upon the ministry; but of this more hereafter. Even his prayers were written out, and learned by heart, years after he took charge of the Hollis Street Church, though I dare say it was not known by his people. Perhaps, too, I may as well say here, lest I may forget to say it hereafter, that, at the time I speak of, he was neither a phrenologist, nor a spiritualist, nor a conscientious believer in witchcraft, or rather in the phenomena that used to be called witchcraft, in the days of Cotton Mather.
Soon after the beginning of our acquaintance, Mr. Joseph L. Lord, the brother of his first wife,—and he too has just passed away,—seeing what the prospect was for the brother-in-law he was so proud of, persuaded him to abandon the law at once, and forever, and go into the jobbing and retail dry-goods business with him, on the corner of Court and Marlborough, now Washington Street. He had no capital, to be sure, but then he wrote a beautiful hand, was very methodical, and had made himself acquainted with bookkeeping, after the Italian method, from Rees's Cyclopædia. I took the chamber which Mr. Pierpont left, and went into the jobbing business also, with a capital of between two and three hundred—dollars, and a credit amounting to perhaps five hundred more, which enterprise terminated after a few months, not in my failure, but in my taking a trip to New York with a large quantity of smuggled goods, belonging to Messrs. Pierpont and Lord, where I disposed of them to such advantage, that, on my return, I was persuaded to go into the retail haberdashery line, at 103 Court Street, next door to Pierpont and Lord, and just underneath the chamber, not chambers, which I had occupied at first with my wholesale establishment. I had for a partner, at first, Erastus, a brother of "Joe's," whom I had known as a bookbinder in Portland two or three years before. He was now manufacturing pocket-books, and appeared to be doing, not only a large and profitable, but safe business,—selling for cash, running a horse and gig, and paying the bills of all the "dear five hundred friends" who rode with him.
Our copartnership did not last long. His brother "Joe," being a shrewd man of business, of uncommon foresight and comprehensiveness, though rather adventurous, gave me a hint, and soon provided me with another partner, a graduate of Cambridge, named Fisher, with whom I was associated a few months longer. Then came the peace of 1815, which threw the whole country into a paroxysm of joy, unsettling business everywhere, at home and abroad, and