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.