,
I saw grim Nature's visage hoar
Struck thy young eye;"

as well as from the delight he expresses in walking beside a planting in
a windy day, and listening to the blast howling through the trees and
raving over the plain. Perhaps his mind was most alive to the sublimity
of _motion_, of agitation, of tumultuous energy, as exhibited in a
snow-storm, or in the "torrent rapture" of winds and waters, because
they seemed to sympathise with his own tempestuous passions, even as the
fierce Zanga, in the "Revenge," during a storm, exclaims---

"I like this rocking of the battlements.
Rage on, ye winds; burst clouds, and waters roar!
You bear a just resemblance of my fortune,
And suit the gloomy habit of my soul."

Probably Burns felt little admiration of the calm, colossal grandeur of
mountain-scenery, where there are indeed vestiges of convulsion and
agony, but where age has softened the storm into stillness, and where
the memory of former strife and upheaving only serves to deepen the
feeling of repose--vestiges which, like the wrinkles on the stern brow
of the Corsair,

"Speak of passion, but of passion past."

With these records of bygone "majestic pains," on the other hand, the
genius of Milton and Wordsworth seemed made to sympathise; and the
former is never greater than standing on Niphates Mount with Satan, or
upon the "hill of Paradise the highest" with Michael, or upon the
"Specular Mount" with the Tempter and the Saviour; and the latter is
always most himself beside Skiddaw or Helvellyn. Byron professes vast
admiration for Lochnagar and the Alps; but the former is seen through
the enchanting medium of distance and childish memory; and among the
latter, his rhapsodies on Mont Blanc, and the cold "thrones of eternity"
around him, are nothing to his pictures of torrents, cataracts,
thunderstorms; in short, of all objects where unrest--the leading
feeling in _his_ bosom--constitutes the principal element in _their_
grandeur. It is curious, by the way, how few good descriptions there
exist in poetry of views _from_ mountains. Milton has, indeed, some
incomparable ones, but all imaginary--such, at least, as no actual
mountain on earth can command; but, in other poets, we at this moment
remember no good one. They seem always looking up _to_, not down from,
mountains. Wordsworth has given us, for example, no description of the
view from Skiddaw; and there does not exist, in any Scottish