ABSTRACT
In 1802, English romantic poet William Wordsworth-‘an Islander by birth,/ a Mountaineer by habit’—described the view from Mont Blanc over the Vale of Chamonix in the following verses:
That very day, From a bare ridge we also first beheld Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved To have a soulless image on the eye That had usurped upon a living thought That never more could be. The wondrous Vale Of Chamouny stretched far below, and soon, With its dumb cataracts and streams of ice, A motionless array of mighty waves, Five rivers broad and vast, made rich amends, And reconciled us to realities;1
The passage is held up as an example of the highly sensitive feeling for the mountain scenery to be found among the Romantic poets. Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s 1959 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite was the first book to trace the development of this mountain aesthetic from the literary heritage of ancient authors through to its ‘perfect expression’ in Wordsworth’s works.2 Nicolson’s book attempts to answer the question she poses in the preface: ‘Why did mountain attitudes change so spectacularly in England?’3 The response offered in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory focuses on passages in Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), a work which combines ‘a violent disparagement of the ugliest objects in nature with an almost lyrical rhapsody on the exalted emotions he had experienced among the Alps’.4
