How it stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which
the Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of
creation! How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who
only crawl about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The
earthly paradise is closed to them.'
Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century,
travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer
to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in
its own day.
But with the eighteenth century came a change. Travelling no longer
subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the
occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a
new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to
explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first
admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror.
Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) _Itinera Alpina_.
Every corner of the Alps was explored--the Splugen, Julier, Furka,
Gotthard, etc.--and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants
examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as
theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain
beauty.
Brockes to some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the
Fourth Book of his _Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Verguengen in
Gott)_; and in his _Observations on the Blankenburg Marble_ he said:
'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful,
their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a discussion of wild
scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder this with joy and
reverence, my soul.
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