So shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Coleridge.
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.