aking the
mountain with wind and falling snow, with leaping rock and earth-eating
torrent. Such would fain die that they may experience the joys of being
possessed by Nature. For they have entered on the marriage of life and
death, heaven and hell, and out of the roaring cataclysm of destruction
they rise winged with a new life.

Whilst the poets chant the awful power of the distant mountain, Byron
comes to us out of the mountain, fashioned by its force, intoxicated by
the wine of its wild life. Mountain climbers meet with strange and
unexpected bedfellows in the course of their wanderings. In his cry for
the baptism of the wild winds of the mountain, Matthew Arnold approaches
Byron closely--

Ye storm-winds of Autumn
. . . . .
Ye are bound for the mountains--
Ah, with you let me go
. . . . .
Hark! fast by the window
The rushing winds go,
To the ice-cumber'd gorges,
The vast seas of snow.
There the torrents drive upward
Their rock-strangled hum,
There the avalanche thunders
The hoarse torrent dumb.
--I come, O ye mountains!
Ye torrents, I come!

Shelley sings exquisitely of its grandeur, its ceaseless motion; he
voices the wonderment of man before the complex problem of Mont Blanc.
But his mind has never participated in the revels on the mountain, he
has not lost and barely recovered his soul in adventurous crevasses. He
retains something of the old horror of the desolate heights--

A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there. How hideously,
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.--Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin?

There is a trace of the same awe in Coleridge's deathless hymn to Mont
Blanc--

On thy bald, awful head, O sovran Blanc,
. . . . .
O dread and silent mount!

Nearly all the poets have been moved by the primitive sense of their
awe-commanding power. Wordsworth never forgets the blackness, though he
is, above all, the bard of mountain light and sweetness, of warbling
birds and maiden's haycocks. The poet does not lose the blessed gift of
wonder possessed by children and savages. And nothing in Nature can
startle the mind like the sight of a mighty range of mountains. They
recall primitive feelings of fear before the great unknown, they