ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND. 33U 



soii«>h< ivfii<iv, and soon loarncd to ^ivo i)ractical proof of his love of 

 scciuMT l)y his clioico of sites for his r('Ii<>;ious houses. But the litera- 

 (uic of the eiiihteeulh ('(Milury was not written by monks or eountry- 

 nien, or by men of worhl-wide curiosity and adventure like the 

 Italians of the Kenaissance or oui- Klizahethans. It was the product 

 of a pi-actical conunon-sense epoch which looked on all waste places, 

 lieaths like Ilindhead, or hills like the IIi<yhlan(ls, as blemishes in the 

 sch(>nie of the universe, not having yet recognized their final purpose 

 ;is o(,I t" links or gynuiasiums. Intellectual life was concentrated in cities 

 and courts; it despised the country. Books were written by towns- 

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

 wdiose denizens therefore had not the longing to escape from their 

 homes into jMirer air that we have to-day. They abused the Alps 

 frankly, liut all they saw of them was the comparatively dull car- 

 riage passes, and these they saAv at the worst time of year. Hasten- 

 ing to Rome for Easter, they traversed the Maurienne wdiile the 

 ground w as still brown wnth frost and patched untidily with half- 

 melted snowdrifts. It is no wonder that Gray and Richardson, hav- 

 ing left spring in the meadows and orchards of Chambery, grumbled 

 at the wintry as])ect of Lanslebou.rg. 



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

 Europe should have preferred a Paris gutter to the lake of Geneva 

 is an annising 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 wdth indifference 

 or dislike. Wordsworth and Byron and Scott in this country, 

 Rousseau 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 tw^o people who have 

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

 hardly quote a book that before people quarreled over education was 

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

 delightful poem in rhyming German verse, written in the seventeenth 

 century, by a Swdss author, Rebman, in which he relates all the great 

 things that happened on mountains in Jew^ish history; hoAV Solomon 

 enjoyed his Sommerfrische on Lebanon; how Moses disappeared 

 on a mountain top and Elias Avas looked for among the mountains; 

 how kings and proj)hets 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 theii' highest mountain, broad-backed Olym- 

 pus, for the home of the gods; their most conspicuous mountain. 



