  I think that the better half, and much the most agreeable one, or the pleasures of the mind is best enjoyed while one is upon one’s legs. Malthus. Dreading as I do any thing which might tempt my patient readers to anticipate adventure, plot, or catastrophe in these chapters, I must premise that the bit of episode, which I am about to relate, is all for the sake of introducing a friend, whose gifts and example wrought a critical change in my studies. It will transfer the attention to certain localities of our neighboring state. Americans need not go to Vaucluse or Vallambrosa for the picturesque; there are scenes among our mountains and our virgin forests which, though different from any thing in the old world, are yet unsurpassed. Especially among the solitudes of that great chain of mountains which runs like a spine from north-east to south-west across many states, there are spots where the sublime and the enchanting meet, and where the most longing soul might find itself sated with the exuberance of beauty. Amidst such seclusions had dwelt my neighbor De Mornay, while yet a youth. He was not a native, indeed, for he was not an American. During the latter years of our Revolution, when Pulaski, Gallatin, and other distinguished foreigners, came to share our fortunes, a Breton gentleman arrived, and disembarked at City Point, below Richmond, with certain mercantile claims upon the State of Virginia. Shortly after his arrival, he made large purchases of land upon the upper waters of the James River; but he had scarcely completed his bargain when he was carried off by one of the fevers of the country. The only representative whom he left was a beautiful boy of fourteen, Albert de Mornay, already mentioned as the subject of this chapter. With all the acumen and warmth which prevail in the best French character, Albert had a decided turn for the contemplative and the mystical, which was encouraged and fostered by his insulation among some of the loveliest recesses of nature. The forests through which he roamed, unbroken by woodman’s axe, and bounded over by the aboriginal deer; the frowning crags which towered over his precipitous path, far up beyond the reach of adventurous footsteps, where the young eagles waited in the eyry for the rapacious parents’ return; the streams, rushing over clean channels in the rock, and pellucid to the bottom, even when many feet in depth; the wide champaign prospects, opened up and down the valley, from certain eminences; all these peculiarities of a mountainous region tended to subdue in young Albert whatever existed of the busy and the pragmatical, and to send him musing to the upland levels, or to the shady spots where crags beetling over the black waters produced the effect of a grotto. His French blood was like that which ran in the veins of Victor de St. Paul, De Rancy, St. Cyr and Pascal. Though a Protestant by education, he nevertheless loved Fenelon; and in turning over the cases of uncut volumes, which his father had ordered from Paris, to constitute his library, Albert soon found himself detained over Bourdaloue and Guion. How remote this taste was from any that prevailed either in France or America, in the latter part of the last century, it is scarcely necessary to say. The French revolution, and the political quarrels of America, almost extinguished the meditative element in society. Generous philosophy and contemplative religion were never in a lower state. In order to preserve any remnants of ascetic or tranquil piety, amidst such commotions, it was necessary to grow up in solitude and to converse with the past. Even monasteries in Europe became places of political gladiatorship, and unfrocked monks were wearing the red cap, and spouting regicide speeches at the Jacobins. These were no halcyon days, but times of tempest. Far, far from these, under the clear skies, and among the gigantic mountain groves of the Allegheny, the days of Albert floated by. The rare appearance of a post-rider, and the occasional gift of a stray newspaper, informed him indeed from time to time of the successive quakings and eruptions in the old political world; but these were much like the convulsions of another planet. His ties to them were very much sundered. He lived in two worlds, but neither of them was the world of turbulent political affairs; he passed daily between the paradise of books, in which he held high converse with the mighty dead, and the paradise of nature, in which he communed with God himself. His training, though solitary, was not incomplete. The best part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself. Yet Albert was not entirely alone. When the elder De Mornay found himself to be dying, he committed his young son to the only friend whom he knew in that part of America; this was another Frenchman, who bore the name of Guerin, a royalist refugee, once a doctor of the Sorbonne, but now (such changes were not uncommon) No one could be less fitted to bring up a young man in the ways of the world; but then he could induct him into all the mysteries of classic and romantic knowledge. He spoke Latin with a purity which has always been coveted in the seminaries of France. He had spent some years at Rome, and was at home in all the works of Dante, Ariosto, Boccacio, Tasso and Petrarca. So much had he been secluded from public affairs, that the old world was almost as familiar to him as the new. True, he was strange to woodcraft and the ways of the huntsman. Never had he discharged a gun; its lock was as mysterious to him as a catapulta. Never had he acquired the gentle art of taking the mountain trout; and when he sat on the green bank, and lifted up his eyes from Lucretius or Seneca, he looked amazed at the line running off Albert’s reel, and at the speckled creatures which the gentle but arch boy landed at his feet. Never were master and scholar better matched; and the relation is a tender one. If Guerin was more pensive than jocose, he could nevertheless relish wit and humor, and he perceived that Albert was daily unfolding new tendencies toward the spiritual and superhuman. The teacher could therefore consent to be laughed at for his bad English, and to bear his share of the burden when Albert had brought down a buck. His brown-study would often be broken by some song of his companion, generally English, such as Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry pote Unto the sweet-bird’s throat, Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. The qualities of Guerin were fit correctives of Albert’s. The teacher was placid, but not mystical; cheerful, but not enthusiastic; scholarly, but not philosophic; kind, but not heroic. Without him, Albert might have been an ignorant zealot, or a fanatical soldier; he never could have been malign or weak. The changes of opinion which had turned so many French priests into infidels, had only made Guerin half a Protestant. He was too yielding and too timid to those of his early profession; nor did his circumstances demand it. But he acquired forbearance, and enlarged the circle of his survey. In turning over the volumes at Crowscrag, the mountain home of Albert, he learned to recognize some virtue even in a Huguenot, and to admire the argument, and taste the truth of writers such as Chamier, Plessis du Mornay, Claude, Sauria, and Bonnet. He and his pupil talked them over among the limestone rocks and caverns of the mountains. But Guerin had cravings which his mercurial ward could not understand. The abbÉ, as he loved to call him, as if penetrated by the mysterious “Zeit-Geist,” swelled with inward longings for communion with the spiritual. The sound of the great ocean came to him even in his solitude; while Albert felt that truth, if ever reached, was for men, for man. Both were religious in their thoughts; but Albert’s religion was less of form and dogma, and more of expansive affection and lofty aspirations. The kind-hearted priest often charged to the account of Protestantism certain traits in his young friend, which he could not understand, and wondered to see him dissatisfied with all the beauties and glories of his mountain-home. Albert possessed a dog, which, as if to mock the attempts of the abbÉ at English consonants, was named Thwackthwart; an awful mouthful, and second only to the proverbial exercise for foreigners, of “thirty thousand thorns thrust through the thick of their thumbs.” The aforesaid Thwackthwart was of that color which you would not willingly denominate, lest you should find it was gray, when you had called it brown; a terrier of such a symmetric shape and attractive shagginess, that at length his ugliness acquired a sort of beauty. I am sure the reader has just such a dog in his mind’s eye, even if he has never had its teeth in the calf of his leg. He was exceedingly useful in a mountain-house, and accompanied Albert on every expedition. As there were no ladies at Crowscrag to be alarmed by such an event, it was not unusual, when the chase had been active, or the weather tempting, for Albert to absent himself several days at a time. However unwelcome this may have been to the abbÉ, he did not complain, but mildly took his seat at the little round table, and gave his orders to Sambo, the servant. Sambo was on the wane of years, but had once been an athletic man, with noticeable signs of Indian blood in his face, while he passed for an African. He was older than any of them, as a dweller in these wilds, and even remembered when buffalo were known to cross low parts of the Allegheny chain. One night, early in May, Guerin was seated at the door of the lonely wooden mansion, which, from its situation under the eastern brow of a rocky mountain, was named Crowscrag. The weather was warm for the season, and a heavy cloud in the southwest was giving forth signs of an approaching thunder-gust. The muttering of the coming storm, and the angry flashes increased as night came on. At length when darkness had begun to prevail, each renewal —— |
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