ere should
be heights above), I find my black top subjected to a process of
shrinking. As I reach the top it ignominiously permits itself to be
flattened out to a mere ridge without a head, a Lilliputian hill
bemoaning its own insignificance.

Such are the illusions of the mountain play. Yet the climb and the
heights have ever served man as a symbol of the search for certainty.
Lecky invokes the heights as the only safe place from which to view
history and discover the great permanent forces through which nations
are moved to improvement or decay. Schopenhauer compares philosophy to
an Alpine road, often bringing the wanderer to the edge of the chasm,
but rewarding him as he ascends with oblivion of the discords and
irregularities of the world. Nietzsche's wisdom becomes pregnant upon
lonely mountains; he claims that whosoever seeks to enter into this
wisdom "must be accustomed to live on mountain-tops and see beneath him
the wretched ephemeral gossip of politics and national egoism."

But the mountain-tops make sport of the certainties of philosophers as
well as of those of fools. The safest plan is to ascend them without too
heavy an encumbrance of theories. You may then meet fairies and goblins
who beckon you to the caves of mystery, you may stray into the hills of
Arcadia and meet Pan himself. "Sweet the piping of him who sat upon the
rocks and fluted to the morning sea." You may even find yourself on
Olympus, the mount of a thousand folds, listening to the everlasting
assault upon the Gods by the Titans, sons of strife. And if you are very
patient you may witness Zeus, the lightning-gatherer, pierce the black
clouds and rend the sky, illuminating hill and vale with the fierce
light which makes even the battle of Troy intelligible.

You may bathe your soul in that Natura Maligna which only reveals its
blessings to pagans and poets. Byron is the chosen bard of the
destructive might of the mountains--

Ye toppling crags of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
. . . . .
The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell,
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heaped with the damned like pebbles.

He had the nature-mystic's thirst for a touch of the untamed power of
Nature, for communion with the magnificence of death, sh