station.

The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard of, and there
could be no thought of the companionship of friends or acquaintances.
Petrarch took with him only his younger brother and two country people
from the last place where he halted. At the foot of the mountain an old
herdsman besought him to turn back, saying that he himself had attempted
to climb it fifty years before, and had brought home nothing but
repentance, broken bones, and torn clothes, and that neither before nor
after had anyone ventured to do the same. Nevertheless, they struggled
forward and upward, till the clouds lay beneath their feet, and at last
they reached the top. A description of the view from the summit would be
looked for in vain, not because the poet was insensible to it, but, on
the contrary, because the impression was too overwhelming. His whole
past life, with all its follies, rose before his mind; he remembered
that ten years ago that day he had quitted Bologna a young man, and
turned a longing gaze toward his native country; he opened a book which
then was his constant companion, the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine, and
his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter, "and men go forth, and
admire lofty mountains and broad seas and roaring torrents and the ocean
and the course of the stars, and forget their own selves while doing
so." His brother, to whom he read these words, could not understand why
he closed the book and said no more.

Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes, in his
rhyming geography, the wide panorama from the mountains of Auvergne,
with the interest, it is true, of the geographer and antiquarian only,
but still showing clearly that he himself had seen it. He must, however,
have ascended higher peaks, since he is familiar with facts which only
occur at a height of ten thousand feet or more above the
sea--mountain-sickness and its accompaniments--of which his imaginary
comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in essence. The
ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he speaks, are perhaps only
fictions.

In the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish school,
Hubert and Johann van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their
landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavor to reflect the real
world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain
poetical meaning--in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of
the West is