r it in
confidence--we do not despise the cooking-pots. For the mountains have a
curious way of lifting you up to the uttermost confines of the spirit
and then letting you down to the lowest dominions of the flesh.

"Examine the nature of your own emotion (if you feel it) at the sight of
the Alps," says Ruskin, "and you find all the brightness of that emotion
hanging like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and
imperfect knowledge." Such a result of our examination would but add to
our confusion. Ruskin's mind was so permeated with adoration of mountain
scenery that his attempts at cool analysis of his own sensations failed,
as would those of a priest who, worshipping before the altar, tried at
the same time to give an analytical account of his state of mind.
Ruskin is the stern high priest of the worshippers of mountains; to him
they are cathedrals designed by their glory and their gloom to lift
humanity out of its baser self into the realization of high destinies.
The fourth volume of _Modern Painters_ was the fount of inspiration from
which Leslie Stephen and the early members of the Alpine Club drank
their first draughts of mountaineering enthusiasm. But the disciples
never reached the heights of the teacher. Listen to the exposition by
the Master of the services appointed to the hills:

"To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's
working--to startle its lethargy with a deep and pure agitation of
astonishment--are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble
architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also
with mighty sculpture and painted legend."

There is a solemn stateliness about Ruskin's descriptions of the
mountains, which in the last passage of the chapter on _The Mountain
Gloom_ rises to the impassioned cadences of the prophet.

He could tolerate no irreverent spirits in the sanctuary of the
mountain. Leslie Stephen's remark that the Alps were improved by
tobacco smoke became a profanity. One shudders at the thought of the
reprimand which Stevenson would have drawn down upon himself had his
flippant messages from the Alps come before that austere critic. In a
letter to Charles Baxter, Stevenson complained of how "rotten" he had
been feeling "alone with my weasel-dog and my German maid, on the top of
a hill here, heavy mist and thin snow all about me and the devil to pay
in general." And worse still are the lines sent to a friend--

Fig