Mountains in Literature

IT may be fair to wonder whether the people who spend the summer in the Adirondacks, or what used to be called, unadvisedly for purposes of advertisement, the White Hills, or who corroborate or contradict the affirmations and implications of Daisy Miller, in Switzerland, understand precisely with what a novel emotion they dilate when they gaze at mountains. Do they know that a little more than a hundred years ago our ancestors, who had their own opinion about their taste, looked with very different feelings at all extraordinary elevations of the earth’s surface? It would naturally seem as if the love of mountain scenery were but the survival of a primitive feeling which was shared by all who had any admiration for the beauties of nature, but on examination it seems like something of very modern growth.

Without going back now to Homer and Virgil, to the rich stores of Hebrew poetry, or even to Milton and Marvell and Chaucer and Spenser, to see how those writers looked at mountains, it may be sufficient to notice how calmly some later authors have spoken about certain scenes, where even unsentimental travelers have learned from their guide-books to stand still, gaze, and give expression to what are doubtless sincere raptures. Travelers in the Middle Ages looked at mountains with very different eyes. The Crusaders made their way through the Tyrol with nothing but dread of the lofty peaks, which they called horribiles, and it was only the cultivated valleys that they called amœnæ. Many examples of this way of regarding natural objects may be found in a little monograph by Professor Friedländer,¹ a book from which I shall draw freely. Thus, be has quoted one remark from a book by Stephen Münster, published in 1544, to the effect that when he stood at the top of the Gemmi his bones and his heart quivered, while all the less awful places he calls pleasant and agreeable in contrast with the terrible cliffs and mountains.

Even Addison, superior as he was to many of his time, who was an admirer of Chevy Chase at a period when the love of ballads was not wide-spread, and who exercised very great influence on German literature by his Saturday papers in the Spectator on Milton’s Paradise Lost, has but cool praise for the natural beauties of Switzerland. Speaking of Thonon, a town on the south shore of the Lake of Geneva, he says: “ There are vistas in front of it of great length, that terminate upon the lake. At one side of the walks you have a near prospect of the Alps, which are broken into so many steeps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror, and form one of the most irregular, misshapen scenes in the world.” Again, in speaking of the view from Berne, he says: “There is the noblest summer-prospect in the world from this walk; for you have a full view of a huge range of mountains that lie in the country of the Grisons, and are buried in snow. They are about twenty-five leagues’ distance from the town, though by reason of their height and their color they seem much nearer.” The shores of the Inn he calls “a fine laudskip.” There is no Cook’s tourist who would not say more than this nowadays.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague describes crossing Mont Cenis, in 1718, as follows: “ The prodigious prospect of mountains covered with eternal snow, of clouds hanging below our feet, and of vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused roaring would have been entertaining to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.”

In Sir Charles Grandison, in the letter No. CLIV., from Mr. Lowther to John Arnold, the same expedition is described, and this account may probably be called a fair example of the general opinion of the time concerning the sort of scenery it describes. “ There [at Pont Beauvoisin] we bid adieu to France, and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty and rocky mountains. Indeed, it was a total change of the scene. We had left behind us a blooming spring, which enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers. The cheerful inhabitants were busy in adjusting their limits, lopping their trees, pruning their vines, tilling their fields; but when we entered Savoy, nature wore a very different face; and I must own that my spirits were great sufferers by the change. Here we began to view on the nearer mountains, covered with ice and snow, notwithstanding the advanced season, the rigid winter in frozen majesty.

“ Overpowered by the fatigues I had undergone in the expedition we had made, the unseasonable coldness of the weather, and the sight of one of the worst countries under heaven, still clothed in snow and deformed by continual hurricanes, I was here taken ill. . . . Every object which here presents itself is excessively miserable.”

Gray, the poet, when he wrote his account of this trip, under date of November 7, 1739, had already expressed himself in very much this way. He said, “The winter was so far advanced as in great measure to spoil the beauty of the prospect ; however, there was still somewhat fine remaining amidst the savageness and horror of the place.” Again, a few weeks later, December 19, 1739, he speaks of the Apennines as “ not so horrid ² as the Alps, though pretty near as high.” Yet these passages are more than outweighed by what he wrote about the Grande Chartreuse. In a letter of October 13th, of the same year, he describes at length the excursion he took thither: “ On the one hand is the rock, with woods of pine-trees hanging overhead; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular,” etc., — all of which may be found put into Latin in the Alcaic Ode he left on the books of the monastery when he visited it again in August, 1741: —

And again, a week after the passage of the Mont Cenis, November 16 th; “I own I have not as yet met anywhere those grand and simple works of art that are to amaze one, and whose sight one is to be the better for; but those of nature have astonished me beyond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining: not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. Mont Cenis, I confess, carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far; and its horrors were accompanied with too much danger to give us time to reflect upon their beauties.”

While Gray came nearer expressing the modern feeling than the other writers from whom quotations have been taken, many travelers of different times were far behind even the coolest of these. Thus, Montaigne, in his Journey into Italy, speaking of the mountains near the Lago di Garda, — in which, it will be remembered, was Catullus’s Sirmio, — says that the mountains belting “ the lake are the most rugged that our gentlemen had yet seen,” and that they found the neighboring road “ the roughest they had as yet traversed, and the scenery was wild and forbidding in the highest degree; both of which circumstances were owing to these same mountains, which here abut on the road.” Of the Apennines he says that they were, “almost without exception, wild and barren.”

The Président de Brosses, who entered Italy by way of Toulon, the Riviera, and Genoa, after speaking of the beautiful prospective made by the mountains at a distance from the Rhone, has nothing to say about the beauty of the maritime Alps; all that he finds to praise is the abundance of well-built and wellpeopled towns and villages. But then it is to be remembered that few travelers have his gift of describing a city.

Now, in the face of the quotations given above from Gray’s Letters,³ to affirm that no one before Rousseau enjoyed mountain scenery would be very much like saving that there was no love of liberty in this country before the Declaration of Independence. Yet the writer will endeavor to show that it was Rousseau who first said in a memorable way what we have learned to repeat so glibly; who first put into precise language what others had doubtless felt more or less, but had failed to express clearly, and that on this account he may be fairly credited with the distinction of enlarging to a considerable extent the sympathies of mankind. And it must not be forgotten that, to put it crudely, no mountains were too high for Rousseau. Even Gray, in his genuine enthusiasm, did not get above the line of vegetation, and the others who preceded Gray did not rise very far from the plain.

Haller, who is better known as a scientific man than as a poet, had finished, in 1729, a poem, Die Alpen, which some one or two German winters have taken to be the cause of the modern interest in Switzerland; but this opinion would seem to be the result of excessive patriotism, for the poem, which is only a very short one, contains no real description of Alpine scenery. It was Thomson who really introduced the description of nature at a time when the usual epithets had become very vague and inexact. Dryden had written such lines as these:

This passage had been much admired in its time, as we know from Mrs. Piozzi, who speaks of it as equal to Shakespeare’s description of night, and from Wordsworth. Yet in Thomson there was a very different way of writing about nature. To he sure, he was much overweighted by ponderous imitation of classical models, and Johnson did a fair thing when he read a passage aloud, leaving out every other line, but yet securing his hearer’s praise of the extract. But in spite of his faults, Thomson saw clearly and frequently described well many natural objects. He was a stranger to the glow we find in later poets, and his thoughts move in a circle that was limited by contemporary fashion; yet, though he nowhere rises to the level of those who, besides enjoying and expressing the beauty of earth, sea, and sky, were able to show their elevating influence upon man, he introduced into English literature a wave of fresh air, which made the way easier for Cowper and Burns and Wordsworth. As Leslie Stephen has said of the Seasons, “there are few poems in which we can more distinctly hear the wind stirring the forests, and feel the sun striking upon the plains.”⁴ His influence over both France and Germany would be an interesting subject of study.

He did not overlook the mountains. Thus, in describing the sunset, Spring, l. 192, he says : —

Again, l. 957: —

In Autumn, l. 711, he calls the mountain “ horrid, vast, sublime.” Winter, l. 389: —

And other similar passages might be quoted, but these are Sufficient to show with what keen eyes Thomson looked on the landscape at a period when poetry was mainly used as a vehicle for ethical argument. John Dyer’s Grongar Hill and Country Walk, 1727, show, too, a similar love of nature, and there can be but little doubt that alongside of the admiration of Pope’s study of man there ran a genuine love of such a poet of nature as Spenser. Against the very frequent gross caricatures of his verse we can set many proofs of the way he was read by Thomson, whose Castle of Indolence was an open imitation, by Gray, Steele, Shenstone, Collins, and even by Pope. Yet while the love of nature probably never died, even in the most artificial period, the discussion of its exact extent would carry us too far. It is the mountains that alone concern us here.

Rousseau it was who first fairly brought them into literature; and yet this is but one of the minor changes he wrought in subsequent literary fashions. In the Nouvelle Héloïse, he gave expression to a genuine love of his native country. The book contains many passages of eloquent descriptions of the scenery of Switzerland. In his Confessions he describes what it is that he thinks a fine country: “ I must have torrents, rocks, pines, black forests, mountains, rough roads running up and down, precipices on each side that shall make me really frightened. Near Chambéry I had this pleasure, and I enjoyed it to the utmost.” And he goes on to paint the scene and the pleasure he had in growing giddy as he looked down the chasms. He may be said to have been the first to sing the beauties of the Lake of Geneva. Thus, in Partie IV., Letter XVII., after describing the view of the two shores from the lake near Meillerie, he speaks of a certain spot: “ This solitary place formed a savage and desert retreat, which was full of those kinds of beauty that please only sensitive souls, and appear horrible to others. Twenty paces off, a turbid stream, formed by the melting snow, was rushing noisily by, carrying with it mud, sand, and stones. Behind us, a chain of inaccessible rocks divided the plateau on which we were from that point of the Alps which is called Les Glacières, from the enormous icy masses that have stood there, continually growing, ever since the creation of the world. Forests of dark pines threw a black shadow on our right. On our left, beyond the torrent, was a great oak wood; and beneath us that vast expanse of water which the lake forms in the bosom of the Alps separated us from the Pays de Vaud. where the summit of the majestic Jura completed the picture.”

Here, too, is Rousseau, speaking in the person of Saint-Preux, who is supposed to be returning from a journey round the world: —

“The nearer I came to Switzerland, the more were my feelings moved. The moment when from the heights of the Jura I descried the Lake of Geneva was a moment of ecstasy and rapture. The sight of my country, that so-beloved country, where torrents of pleasure had overwhelmed [inondé] my heart, the wholesome, pure air of the Alps; the soft air of home [de la patrie], sweeter than the perfumes of the East ; this rich and fertile soil; this unrivaled landscape, the most beautiful that human eye has ever seen; this charming spot, of which I had never beheld the like in my journey; the sight of a happy and free people; the softness of the season; the gentleness of the climate; a thousand delicious memories that recalled all the emotions I had felt, — all these things threw me into transports that I cannot describe.” ⁵

There are other passages in this as well as in some of his other works that might be quoted, but these may serve as examples of Rousseau’s affection for nature, and especially of his feeling about the grand scenery of Switzerland. Of the interest that was felt at the time in the Nouvelle Héloïe, those of us who remember the excitement over the appearance of the first volumes of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables can probably form an accurate idea. The book was let out by the circulating libraries for the sum of twelve sous an hour, and was read and admired in spite of Voltaire’s sneers. Those who take it up now (and it cannot be recommended to all readers) will have no difficulty in seeing why it was popular. Rousseau’s eloquence has not lost its charm in more than a century, and his eagerness and evident sincerity could not fail of an effect upon readers who asked nothing beyond the kindling of their emotions. In spite of what seems to us its excessive length, it must have appeared like one of a half-hour series to those who read Richardson without yawning. As has been said, the praise of nature that the story contained is but one of its minor merits; more complicated social questions — entirely outside of the one the book was written to establish — were discussed with great freedom, but they do not belong here. The curious reader will find them treated at due length and with remarkable skill in an excellent book, Erich Schmidt’s Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe (Jena, 1875).

It would be unwise to say that Goethe’s Werther was but the result of Rousseau’s novel, yet it is impossible not to see the enormous influence the French writer’s work had upon the young German. Rousseau introduced into literature an clement that had been lacking heretofore, and Goethe lent additional impulse to the general excitement. We find in Goethe many traces of the French model; as Mr. Morley says, in his book on Rousseau,⁶ “ We may be sure that Werther (1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter if Saini-Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream arid cakes with her children and her female servants; and perhaps the other and nobler Charlotte of the Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) would not have detained us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie had not had her Elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and color, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand birds reminded the returned traveler of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.”

The direct effects that Rousseau’s eloquent words about nature had on French literature are sufficiently clear when we think of Paul and Virginia, Atala and René, and Obermann. It is the lastnamed book that most concerns us here in the discussion of mountains. Obermann is perhaps better known through Mr. Matthew Arnold’s poem than for itself; and while it is true that, as SainteBeuve says of the hero, by being so ennuyé he at last runs the risk of becoming ennuyeux, there are passages in his Confessions (for Such they were) that are, to speak mildly, sufficiently striking. We may be unable to sympathize with the enthusiasm of an older generation of French readers about the book, yet no one can fail to notice how Rousseau had taught its author to find companionship in mountains.

In English literature we shall find it harder to discover precise traces of Rousseau’s influence. The truth would seem to be that in this case, as in so very many others, it is almost impossible to put our finger on any one man and say that he was the first to give expression to any particular thought. Just us with inventions there are half a dozen inventors who are forever discussing the priority of their claims to the distinction of originality, until mankind, growing weary of the discussion, settles the matter once for all, and refuses to have the question reopened, so it is with many literary matters. To adopt a phrase of Chauncey Wright’s, there would seem to be a sort of intellectual weather, the laws of which we cannot detect, that controls the apparently disorderly succession of the movements of thought, that produces apparently unrelated movements of almost the same kind, at wholly remote places. Merely to enumerate the attending circumstances is not to give a satisfactory explanation of the underlying causes, and to put down all that later English poets have uttered concerning nature to Rousseau’s credit would be a great mistake. How many points of resemblance there are between Cowper and Rousseau has often been shown, and we can have no doubt that the modest English poet was to some extent influenced by his more famous contemporary. But it would be hard to indicate a line that one would be safe in assuming owed direct inspiration from Rousseau. The movement was in the air, and while in their glorification of family life they both were moved by like feelings, it is hard to see how Cowper, who, we know, read Rousseau, could have withstood his charm, or could have escaped being much moved by him.

Perhaps the one of Rousseau’s predecessors who most nearly anticipated the modern enthusiasm about mountains was Beattie, in his Minstrel. And it is not to be forgotten that the feeling for nature never quite died out of English poetry. Even Akenside, whom no future times will ever mistake for a poet of this century, brought into his Pleasures of Imagination many references to nature, although they were principally of an academic sort. For example :—

It is no wonder that he said, what indeed few would deny, that

While Addison, backed by one quotation from Horace and one from Virgil, affirmed in the Spectator. No. 414, that “ tho' there are several of the wild Scenes, that are more delightful than any artificial Shows; yet we find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art,” others knew simpler joys. And it may be said, by the way, that in this very number of the Spectator Addison anticipated Rousseau by abusing artificial gardens. “ Our British gardeners,” he observes, “ . . . instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of the Scissors upon every Plant and Bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my Opinion, but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure.” And he compares these artificial arrangements and the little labyrinths with the wilder beauty of French and Italian gardens, just, as, half a century later, Rousseau complained of the artificiality of these in comparison with the naturalness of the English parks.⁷

Doctor Johnson did not anticipate the taste of the present day in regard to natural objects. In his Journey to the Western Islands, he has more or less to say about mountains, and he speaks of them with calmness: “ They exhibit very little variety, being almost wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be cheeked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her care. and disinherited of her favours; left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation.

“It will very readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveler; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the understanding. . . . Regions mountainous and wild, thinly inhabited and little cultivated, make a great part of the earth, and he that has never seen them must live unacquainted with much of the face of nature, and with one of the great scenes of human existence.” And a few lines further, he describes a place where he rested: “Before me, and on either side, were hills, which, by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know not; for here I first conceived the thought of this narration.”

Goldsmith, too, had written about the same country in a letter dated September 26, 1753: “ Shall I fire you with a description of this unfruitful country, where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarcely able to feed a rabbit? Man alone seems to be the only creature who has arrived to the natural size in this poor soil. Every part of the country presents the same dismal landscape. No grove nor brook lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty.” And later, in writing from Leyden, he says, “ Scotland and this country bear the highest contrast. There, hills and rocks intercept every prospect; here ’t is all a continued plain.” In his poems, too, and notably in The Traveller, the descriptions of scenery, though accurate, are quite untinged by emotion.

Yet Beattie is not to be forgotten meanwhile; Johnson and Goldsmith were two of his friends, but he belonged in feeling to a later generation. In his Minstrel he describes a youth who. came to poetry through lonely communion with nature:

(Dock I., xvii.)

And I., xix: —

XX.

And liii.: —

“ Oft when the winter storm had ceased to rave,
He roamed the stormy waste at even, to view
The cloud stupendous, from th' Atlantic wave
High-towering, sail along th’ horizon blue ;
Where, midst the changeful scenery, ever new,
Fancy a thousand wondrous forms descries,
More wildly great than ever pencil drew, —
Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size,
And glittering cliffs on cliffs, and fiery ramparts rise.”

And lviii: —

In these extracts we have certain sides of nature sung by one who both knew them and loved them; to set Goldsmith’s somewhat frigid enumeration of the objects of the landscape above descriptive poetry like Gray’s, Collins’s, and Beattie’s, as Mr. Stopford Brooke has done in his Theology in the English Poets, because Goldsmith “ freed the landscape in his descriptions from the burden of human feeling,” which the others and Thomas Warton “ had imposed upon it,” — to do this is something like arranging the facts to suit a theory. The only prospect the Traveller really saw was not that of hills and fields and rivers, but, as the second part of the title runs, a prospect of society. The Alps were, in Goldsmith’s eyes, nothing more than a sort of natural bulwark, which protected the Swiss against the dangers of civilization.

To speak of “creation’s charms,” and “ woods over woods, in gay, theatric pride,” can hardly be called with justice an advance over the way in which Beattie sang of the scenery he loved.

In fact, The Minstrel has a very modern sound, in spite of its slight artificiality, and there is a passage from Beattie’s Retirement that has a quality many of onr contemporaries have struggled for in vain. This is it: —

It will be noticed that the two poets who, in a time when artificial poetry was most popular, broke away into open praise of nature, namely, THomson and Beattie, were both Scotchmen, as were also Logan and Michael Bruce, who followed more or less in their footsteps, to say nothing of Burns; and this love of describing nature had been a trait of Scotch poets from the earliest times. Yet even they were not alone; besides Gray, Collins, and T. Warton in England, we occasionally find traces of the same feeling among the Germans. klopstock, to be sure, had no eye for the scenery of Switzerland, — and one may say this in the face of his ode to Lake Zurich. Indeed, he was hardly more alive to it than was St. Bernard, of whom the story is told that, having one day journeyed along the shores of the Lake of Geneva, he was asked what he thought of the lake. “ What lake? ” was his answer. He had not noticed the view at all. Yet Winckelmann, in describing his journey to Italy in the autumn of 1755, spoke with real enthusiasm of the part of it that ran through the Tyrol. “I was happier,” says one of his letters, “in a village, in a ravine between the snow-covered mountains, than even in Italy. No one has seen anything wonderful or astounding who has not seen this land with the same eyes with which I viewed it. Here mother Nature appears in her astounding grandeur.” And a few lines further on he speaks of the “ awfully beautiful [erschrecklich schöner] mountains.”

After all, while there were many who felt more or less distinctly a love for mountain scenery, it was Rousseau who was the first to give expression to it in what must have seemed to his contemporaries the final way. To what had been a latent, undefined, vague emotion he gave such life by the force of his eloquence and the contagion of his example that those who felt his power at once followed in the new path he opened before them. He did not create the feeling, but he stamped it with his genius, and it became current coin. To suppose, for instance, that Rousseau was in any sense the intellectual father of, say, Wordsworth’s love of wild scenery would be most rash. As we have tried to show, there were many things leading to the same end, yet Rousseau doubtless aided Wordsworth in defining his ideas, as he surely aided the poet’s readers to the appreciation of his work.

Of one direct result, the increased interest in Switzerland, there are many proofs. Not only are there in the letters of that time frequent references to the Alps and their newly discovered beauty; travelers, too, turned their steps in that direction. Among the first was Goethe, who, in 1779, visited Switzerland with the Counts Stolberg. The Briefe aus der Schweiz, Zweite Abtheilung,⁸ contain many full descriptions of the objects he saw and studied, and there are occasional references to the fact, that the country was becoming a place of frequent resort. Thus, under date of October 27, 1779, he says, “ Here and there on the way much was said about the interest of the glaciers of Savoy, and when we reached Geneva we heard that it was becoming more and more the fashion to visit them, so that the count became extremely anxious to go there,” in spite of the lateness of the season; and thither they went. They found a lodging-house opened some years before " in honor of the visitors,” and, more than this, they came to a hut, belonging to an English resident of Geneva, Mr. “ Blaire,”— may he not have been a mountain-loving Scotchman? — with a window in it overlooking the whole glacier. One of the guides told Goethe that he had accompanied strangers about the mountains for twenty-eight years; in which case he must have been one of the earliest of the Chamouny guides, for it was in 1741 that two-Englishmen, Pococke and Windham, may be said to have discovered the valley of Ckamouny. It is curious to read that they made their way into what they took for a haunt of robbers armed to the teeth, escorted by an armed band, and that they passed the night in tents, with watch-fires burning and sentinels on guard against an attack. Saussure says that twenty or twenty-five years later the place was seldom visited, and then almost entirely by Englishmen, who were attracted there as much by Saussure’s account of Chamouny as by anything else. Goethe’s father could not understand why his son turned back on the top of the St. Gothard instead of going down into Italy. “He was especially unable to evince the smallest, sympathy for those rocks and misty lakes and nests of dragons.”

Coxe, who, between 1776 and 1785, published several editions of his Travels in Switzerland, a book that is full of information, spoke of the awful “ sublimity of the falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen.” Elsewhere he says, as if in reference to those of an older generation who agreed with Goethe’s father, “ Those who are pleased with an uniform view may continue in the plain; while others, who delight in the grand and the sublime, and are struck with the wantonness of wild, uncultivated nature, will prefer this road [from Appenzell to Salets] to the smoothest turnpike in Great Britain.”

Yet even he had feelings of reaction, as when he says, “ The traveler may be disappointed, whose imagination has been previously filled with turgid description, or who applies to the valleys of ice that sublimity and magnificence which are principally due to the Alps above and around them.” ⁹

But quotations must stop. It will be noticed that as there were brave men before Agamemnon,so there were mountain lovers before Rousseau, yet that he was the first to give his beloved Alps, and, indeed, mountains in general, the place they now hold in literature.¹⁰ Imlac, the poet in Rasselas, had said, to be sure, that mountains, like everything else in nature, ought to be studied by all who followed his profession, who should “ be conversant with all that is awfully vast, or elegantly little; ” but Rousseau, in his hatred of the society he saw about him, saw what he supposed to be an uncorrupted race, living in a region where one might forget what the inhabitants never knew, the vices of the town. The love of his native land and the memory of his long-lost innocence were associated with Switzerland, and there he placed the ideal household of the Nouvelle Héloïse. Among its mountains, in its grand scenery, he could forget what he hated; he read in them his own detestation of worldliness; and while we have learned to look at civilization in a different way, we have not lost that view of nature which he was the first to open to us. Even if we gaze at the mountains or at plains with other emotions, it may be that in the complexity of civilization we have grown accustomed to finding whatever we please in the landscape, and that we read in it what we have in our own hearts. Perhaps, to take an example, the expanse of ocean, which, from association or emotion, expresses despair to one, and may express calm joy to another, is like a great mirror which images but what gazes at it. And so it may be with nature in general. Is it not possible, too, that our present enthusiasm about it is closely related to the modern feeling about music, of which very much the same thing is true?

Thomas Sergeant Perry.