enjoyment of mountain
scenery which exclude some minds which we should expect to find amongst
the devotees and include others for whom we might look amongst the
scoffers. Dickens was profoundly affected by the mountain-presence. His
letters show the true rapture. Of the scenery of the St. Gothard he
writes: "Oh God! what a beautiful country it is. How poor and shrunken,
beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect!" He sees "places of
terrible grandeur unsurpassable, I should imagine, in the world." Going
up the Col de Balme, he finds the wonders "above and beyond one's
wildest expectations." He cannot imagine anything in nature "more
stupendous or sublime." His impressions are so prodigious that he would
rave were he to write about them. At the hospice of the Great St.
Bernard he awakes, believing for a moment that he had "died in the night
and passed into the unknown world." Tyndall's scientific ballast cannot
keep him from soaring in a similar manner. His _Glaciers of the Alps_
contains some highly strung sentences of delight. "Surely," he writes of
sunset seen near the Jungfrau, "if beauty be an object of worship, these
glorious mountains with rounded shoulders of the purest white,
snow-crested, and star-gemmed, were well calculated to excite sentiments
of adoration." His wealth of words increases with the splendour of the
views in which he revels; he becomes a poet in prose, he calls up symbol
and simile, he strains language to express the inexpressible. The sky
of the mountain is "rosy violet," which blends with "the deep zenithal
blue"; it wears "a strange and supernatural air"; he sees clear spaces
of amber and ethereal green; the blue light in the cave of the glacier
presents an aspect of "magical beauty." There is true worship of the
idol in the following lines descriptive of sunrise on Mont Blanc:

The mountain rose for a time cold and grand, with no apparent
stain upon his snows. Suddenly the sunbeams struck his crown and
converted it into a boss of gold. For some time it remained the
only gilded summit in view, holding communion with the dawn,
while all the others waited in silence. These, in the order of
their heights, came afterwards, relaxing, as the sunbeams struck
each in succession, into a blush and smile.

Tyndall holds the mastership of polychromatic description of the
beauties of the mountain; he makes us feel his own response to their
call to the depths of aesthetic pe