FORERUNNERS 9 



thirty languages, ancient and modern. He also practised as a 

 doctor ! But the trait that gives him a place here and endears 

 him to all mountaineers is that he was the first man boldly to 

 profess a love of climbing for its own sake, and to enjoy and 

 depict in the modern spirit the incidents of Alpine travel. 



Gesner died at the early age of forty-nine, before he had had 

 time to write the book on mountains which he tells us he had in 

 his mind. But it is clear from the letter written in 1541 to a 

 friend on The Admiration of Mountains? and from the preface to 

 the account of his ascent of one of the summits of Pilatus in 

 1550, that the seed he sowed, if it took long to spread abroad 

 and germinate, 2 did not fall altogether on stony ground. Passages 

 from both have been of late frequently quoted, but they can 

 hardly be quoted too often. Here is an extract from the 

 former : 



' I have determined, therefore,' writes Gesner to his friend, the 

 most learned Avienus (his real name was Vogel), ' as long as God grants 

 me life to climb every year several mountains, or at least one, in the 

 flower-season, partly for the sake of botanical studies, partly for 

 honest bodily exercise, and for my own satisfaction. For what, think 

 you, must be the pleasure, what the delight a mind properly attuned 

 feels when one gazes with admiration on the bulk of mountains and 

 raises one's head among the clouds ! The consciousness is in some 

 vague way impressed by the stupendous heights 3 and is drawn to the 

 contemplation of the Great Architect. Men of dull mind admire 

 nothing, sleep at home, never go out into the Theatre of the World, 

 hide in corners, like dormice, through the winter, never recognise 

 that the human race was sent into the world in order that through 

 its marvels it should learn to recognise some higher Power, the Supreme 

 Being Himself. . . . Let them roll like pigs in their mud ; let them 

 he stupefied by the pursuit of gain and illiberal studies. Students 

 of philosophy endeavour to view with the eyes both of their souls and 

 bodies the glories of this earthly Paradise, and amongst these they 



1 Printed as a preface to his Libellus de Lacte. See Coolidge's J. Simler el les 

 Origines de FAlpinisme for a full translation and comments. 



2 Simler, in the letter to the Bishop of Sion which introduces his History of 

 the Valais (1574), paraphrases the former, and a hundred and thirty-four years 

 later Scheuchzer started his Itinera Alpina (1708) with a long quotation from 

 The Admiration of Mountains. 



3 Compare Tennyson's 



' Some vague emotion of delight 

 In gazing up an Alpine height.' 



