There is something hard to express in the retrospect which one takes in chilly and over-prudent old age, of the periods when youth was boiling over, and when the mind, so far from being ashamed of its enthusiasms, rather gloried in them. It is not merely in trances of youthful love, that the soul is ’rapt into a condition above what is normal and beyond what can be enduring; friendship, poetry, romance and even learning (wo to the scholar who knows it not) have their times of incantation. But to give full occasion for such experience there must be a nice conjuncture of place and age and person; which befel me under some signal aspect of the celestial signs when our quiet groves were visited by Albert de Mornay. A few months had graven on him the characters of years. Though at a later period he came to some knowledge of his departed Mentor, the meek and venerable Guerin, Albert at this time lamented him as lost, and mourned over the lessons of wisdom which, in the buoyancy of a spirit which now seemed frivolous, he had neglected and all but derided. Now the full shadow of his preceptor’s tenets, example and character, fell upon him with too sombre a veil. What he remembered was chiefly the recluse pensiveness of the solitary. Books which he might otherwise have forgotten, and discourses to which he had scarcely known himself to be attending, while he was adjusting his rifle or making flies for the angle, revisited his thoughts like memories of the dead. It was Plato, it was Petrarca, it was Fenelon, that became the resort of his gentle spirit. And as he grew paler, as his voice became softer and more feminine, so his sentiments assumed a sad or rather an aspiring mood, much in contrast with the loudness and exuberance of his mountain days of health. Mingled with this were a group of qualities which fastened me to him as “with hooks of steel.” No more to guide the foaming steed, or cheer the hunting company with his sonorous voice, he hung over the volumes of ancient lore, and sat at the embowered window gazing on the moon which twinkled all night on the reflecting ripples of the Roanoke.

Greek tragedy possesses a secret charm for such moments, which is undetected even by many a ripe scholar in our baby-whirling age. It was Electra, it was Antigone, and it was Alcestis, that rose before the enchanted eye of the once gay Frenchman, with the austere but unearthly loveliness of antique sculpture. To me this was a lesson but partially comprehended, yet I owe to Albert my transition from the vexing punctilios of the grammarian to the high contemplations of literary and poetic enthusiasm.

Friendship adds intelligence to letters. I felt then and feel now the force of the nisi hoc sciat alter. In solitary lucubration I might have grown into the accomplished school-master; but I should never have had an ear for the august harmonies which sometimes swell through the terrestrial infidelity of Lucretius, if I had not heard the heroic measures read with the dulcet music of a companion’s voice. I never should have been able, as at a later day, to pore serenely over Goethe’s Iphigenia. I never should have comprehended the enigmas of the Religio Medici. I never should have loved the sententious sweetness of Quesnel. I never should have found myself awakened, as at a trumpet’s alarum, by the undoctrinal and vague, but stimulating rhapsodies of Schleiermacher’s Reden. I never should have made pilgrimage, as I did long after, from the old capital of Burgundy to the mount where St. Bernard was born. All this I owed to the contagion of a lofty and loving soul.

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