Those tend'rer tints, that shun the careless eye,
And, in the world's contagious circle, die.
St. Aubert cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care.
He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance
with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English,
chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She
discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was
St. Aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every
innocent means of happiness. 'A well-informed mind,' he would say, 'is
the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant
mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to
escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the
pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will
be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within.
Thought, and cultivation, are necessary equally to the happiness of a
country and a city life; in the first they prevent the uneasy sensations
of indolence, and afford a sublime pleasure in the taste they create for
the beautiful, and the grand; in the latter, they make dissipation less
an object of necessity, and consequently of interest.'
It was one of Emily's earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes
of nature; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she
most delighted; she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the
mountain; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where the
silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart,
and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In scenes like
these she would often linger along, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till
the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a
sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog, were all that broke
on the stillness of the evening. Then, the gloom of the woods; the
trembling of their leaves, at intervals, in the breeze; the bat,
flitting on the twilight; the cottage-lights, now seen, and now
lost--were circumstances that awakened her mind into effort, and led to
enthusiasm and poetry.
Her favourite walk was to a little fishing-house, belonging to St.
Aubert, in a woody glen, on the margin of a rivulet that descended from
the Pyrenees, and, after foaming among their rocks, wound its silent
way beneath the shades it reflected. Above the woods, that screened this
glen, rose the lofty summits of the Pyrenees, which often burst boldly
on the eye through the glades below. Sometimes the shattered face of
a rock only was seen, crowned with wild shrubs; or a shepherd's cabin
seated on a cliff, overshadowed by dark cypress, or waving ash. Emerging
from the deep recesses of the woods, the glade opened to the distant
landscape, where the rich pastures and vine-covered slopes of Gascony
gradually declined to the plains; and there, on the winding shores of
the Garonne, groves, and hamlets, and villas--their outlines softened by
distance, melted from the eye into one rich harmonious tint.