Atlantic Monthly

"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!

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 ex