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.