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)
secularized, and seeking his bread by the only science which he could
turn into a useful art, namely, mathematics. Singular was the providence
which had thrown the orphan boy into the arms of such a man. Guerin was
rather below the middle stature, but with that symmetry of person which
leaves nothing to desire. His complexion was fair; his brow was open and
serene, surmounting a clear, large, innocent, contemplative eye; the
brown hair had gathered itself at the sides of his well-formed head,
leaving the crown in a state of natural tonsure, befitting his former
vocation. Delicate lips and regular teeth, taken in connection with
hands which had known no early labor, conveyed the impression of rank
and refinement. When forced to fly, the exile finds celibacy to be an
advantage. Guerin was happy even in the wilds of America; he was more
than happy when he found not only a ward and companion, in his friend’s
son, but a thousand friends revived, in his library.
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 of the lurid glare revealed wide tracts
of the gray valleys, and disclosed yawning depths in the ragged hills,
while the rain descended in torrents. Albert was still absent, and
though both courageous and robust, was, in the estimation of his friend,
exposed to manifold dangers. There was no house within many miles,
except a temporary lodge on the opposite mountain, which had been used
as a station in topographical surveys. This, though several miles
distant, was so situated as to be visible by daylight; and Guerin often
endeavored to catch a glimpse of it with his pocket-telescope, during
intervals of the electric illumination. Midnight came, however, and yet
no tidings of the wanderer. The good abbé paced the floor for hours, but
at length yielded to weariness, and slept soundly. When he awoke to the
clear shining of another day, he felt a pang at not seeing Albert; and
he never saw him more.