em? That same
unlucky trick of joking is taken to indicate that we don't care much
about the scenery; for who, with a really susceptible soul, could be
facetious under the cliffs of Jungfrau or the ghastly precipices of the
Matterhorn? Hence people who kindly excuse us from the blame of
notoriety-hunting generally accept the "greased-pole" theory. We are, it
seems, overgrown schoolboys, who, like other schoolboys, enjoy being in
dirt, and danger, and mischief, and have as much sensibility for natural
beauty as the mountain mules. And against this, as a more serious
complaint, I wish to make my feeble protest, in order that my
lamentations on quitting the profession may not seem unworthy of a
thinking being.

Let me try to recall some of the impressions which mountaineering has
left with me, and see whether they throw any light upon the subject. As
I gaze at the huge cliffs where I may no longer wander, I find
innumerable recollections arise--some of them dim, as though belonging
to a past existence; and some so brilliant that I can scarcely realise
my exclusion from the scenes to which they belong. I am standing at the
foot of what, to my mind, is the most glorious of all Alpine
wonders--the huge Oberland precipice, on the slopes of the Faulhorn or
the Wengern Alp. Innumerable tourists have done all that tourists can do
to cocknify (if that is the right derivative from cockney) the scenery;
but, like the Pyramids or a Gothic cathedral, it throws off the taint of
vulgarity by its imperishable majesty. Even on turf strewn with
sandwich-papers and empty bottles, even in the presence of hideous
peasant-women singing "Stand-er auf" for five centimes, we cannot but
feel the influence of Alpine beauty. When the sunlight is dying off the
snows, or the full moon lighting them up with ethereal tints, even
sandwich-papers and singing women may be forgotten. How does the memory
of scrambles along snow aretes, of plunges--luckily not too deep--into
crevasses, of toil through long snowfields, towards a refuge that seemed
to recede as we advanced--where, to quote Tennyson with due alteration,
to the traveller toiling in immeasurable snow--

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
The chalet sparkles like a grain of salt;--

how do such memories as these harmonise with the sense of superlative
sublimity?

One element of mountain beauty is, we shall all admit, their vast size
and steepness. That a mountain is very big, and is f