nd to indulge in presentiments.

On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the
half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness:

It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the
world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains
enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you
would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you
had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line
of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of
the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse
thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track
they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind
us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds
continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over
the whole scene a perpetually moving veil.

He sums up the impressions made on him with:

The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites
within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment.

The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his
visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining
process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne,
was _Iphigenia_.

Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more
matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific
observer.

He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of
looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the
things what actually was not there.'

He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her
influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest.
Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape,
and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much
diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in
such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily.

The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil
clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of
the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of
trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the
ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this
change, which led him, as he said in his _Treatise on Granite_,