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