ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND. 545 



links or gymnasiums. Intellectual life was concentrated in cities and 

 courts, it despised the country. Books were written by townsmen, 

 dwellers in towns which had not grown into vast cities, and whose 

 denizens therefore had not the longing to escape from their homes into 

 purer air that we have to-day. They abused the Alps frankly. But 

 all they saw of them was the comparatively dull carriage passes, and 

 these they saw at the worst time of year. Hastening to Kome for 

 Easter, they traversed the Maurienne while the ground was still brown 

 with frost and patched untidily with half-melted snowdrifts. It is no 

 wonder that Gray and Eichardson, having left spring in the meadows 

 and orchards of Chambery, grumbled at the wintry aspect of Lansle- 

 bourg. 



That at the end of the eighteenth century a literary lady of western 

 Europe preferred a Paris gutter to the Lake of Geneva is an amusing 

 caricature of the spirit of the age that was passing away, but it is no 

 proof that the love of mountains is a new mania, and that all earlier 

 ages and peoples looked on them with indifference or dislike. Words- 

 worth and Byron and Scott in this country, Eousseau and Goethe, De 

 Saussure and his school abroad broke the ice, but it was the ice of a 

 winter frost, not of a glacial period. 



Consider for a moment the literature of the two peoples who have 

 most influenced European thought — the Jews and the Greeks. I need 

 hardly quote a book that before people quarrelled over education was 

 known to every child — the Bible. I would rather refer you to a de- 

 lightful poem in rhyming German verse written in the seventeenth 

 century by a Swiss author, Bebman, in which he relates all the great 

 things that happened on mountains in Jewish history: how Solomon 

 enjoyed his Sommerfrische on Lebanon, and Moses and Elias both dis- 

 appeared on mountain tops; how kings and prophets found their help 

 among the hills; how closely the hills of Palestine are connected with 

 the story of the Gospels. 



Consider, again, Greece, where I have just been wandering. Did 

 the Greeks pay no regard to their mountains ? They seized eagerly on 

 any striking piece of hill scenery and connected it with a legend or a 

 shrine. They took their highest mountain, broad-backed Olympus, for 

 the home of the gods ; their most conspicuous mountain, Parnassus, for 

 the home of poetry. They found in the cliffs of Delphi a dwelling for 

 their greatest oracle and a center for their patriotism. One who has 

 lately stood on the top of Parnassus and seen the first rays of the sun 

 as it springs from the waves of the iEgean strike its snows, while Attica 

 and Bceotia and Eubcea still lay in deep shadow under his feet, will 

 appreciate the famous lines of Sophocles, which I will not quote, as I 

 am uncertain how you may pronounce Greek in this university. You 

 may remember, too, that Lucian makes Hermes take Charon, when he 



VOL. lxv. — 35. 



