l about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The
earthly paradise is closed to them.'

Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century,
travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer
to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in
its own day.

But with the eighteenth century came a change. Travelling no longer
subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the
occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a
new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to
explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first
admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror.

Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) _Itinera Alpina_.
Every corner of the Alps was explored--the Splugen, Julier, Furka,
Gotthard, etc.--and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants
examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as
theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain
beauty.

Brockes to some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the
Fourth Book of his _Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Verguengen in
Gott)_; and in his _Observations on the Blankenburg Marble_ he said:
'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful,
their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a discussion of wild
scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder this with joy and
reverence, my soul. The mountain heights wild and beautiful shew us a
picture of earthly disorder.'[7] It was very long before expressions
of horror and fear entirely disappeared from descriptions of the
Alps. In Richardson's _Sir Charles Grandison_ we read: 'We bid adieu
to France and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty
and rocky mountains. We had left behind us a blooming Spring, which
enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we
passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers.... Every object
which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' Savoy is 'one
of the worst countries under Heaven.'

Addison,[8] on the other hand, wrote of the Alps from Ripaille: 'It
was the pleasantest voyage in the world to follow the windings of
this river Inn through such a variety of pleasing scenes as the
course of it naturally led us. We had sometimes on each side of us a
vast extent of naked rocks and mountains, broken into a thousand
irregular s