ABSTRACT
The emotional experience of the sublime seasoned the aesthetic pleasure of touring the domestic landscape. Walking from Pont-y-Pair to Rhyd-Lanfair, Lee paused to admire a swollen watercourse against a backdrop of cloud-capped mountains, through a dimming mist of rain, concluding that ‘No body could feel the situation untill exactly in similar one’.1 He sought out the wild and untamed, eager to experience Burke’s ‘sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime.’2 He also wished to experience extreme sensations, acutely expressed in his disappointment at the celebrated Powerscourt waterfall in Wicklow, which he found ‘excessively tame and looks like [a] place where one could have said a gentleman has shewed his taste in making a waterfall more than a fine bold work of nature’.3 By the time he reached Killarney – by then an established destination for the landscape tourist – he thrilled at prospect of rocks falling on him as he roamed the surrounding mountains: ‘Mountains [are] wonderfully ragged and and [sic] loose stones appear hanging over the tops as if ready to fall. I must leave off and go on or they will certainly come down on me.’4
