“IN the Convent garden and elsewhere he delighted to sing [prayers to Mary] with intense sweetness, devotion, and enthusiasm. His sighs and tears would often interrupt his song, and thus disclose his fervour, love, and ardent piety. ‘What a touching sight to witness the greatest scholar of the Middle Ages, who combined in himself every species of science, walking alone in the garden of Cologne Convent, and singing with tears the praises of Mary his queen!

“Nor does Prussia seem able to tell us enough of our Master’s devotion to the holy Mother of God. He styles him Mary’s secretary, who surpassed all who have ever written Concerning her. ‘For,’ says he, ‘the Jeromes, the Ambroses, the Augustines, the Bernards, the Anselms, and the John Damascenes have extolled her in rapturous language and with all the charms of the most fragrant devotion; they have shown, in a style brilliant with beauty, how amiable she is, how powerful, full in merit, rich in virtue, in short, how good and compassionate she is; but, despite their reasoning, which amounts even to evidence, they know not how to convince the mind of the auditor as our venerable Master docs when he speaks of Mary in his sermons.”

— Dr. Joachim Stighart, Albert the Great, of the Order of Friar-Preachers: His Life and Scholastic Labours (1876)

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