s
a narrow line by which a way may be found to the top of any given
mountain; but the clue leads through innumerable inaccessibilities;
true, you can follow one path, but to right and left are cliffs which no
human foot will ever tread, and whose terrors can only be realised when
you are in their immediate neighbourhood. The cliffs of the Matterhorn
do not bar the way to the top effectually, but it is only by forcing a
passage through them that you can really appreciate their terrible
significance.

Hence I say that the qualities which strike every sensitive observer are
impressed upon the mountaineer with tenfold force and intensity. If he
is as accessible to poetical influences as his neighbours--and I don't
know why he should be less so--he has opened new avenues of access
between the scenery and his mind. He has learnt a language which is but
partially revealed to ordinary men. An artist is superior to an
unlearned picture-seer, not merely because he has greater natural
sensibility, but because he has improved it by methodical experience;
because his senses have been sharpened by constant practice, till he can
catch finer shades of colouring, and more delicate inflexions of line;
because, also, the lines and colours have acquired new significance, and
been associated with a thousand thoughts with which the mass of mankind
has never cared to connect them. The mountaineer is improved by a
similar process. But I know some sceptical critics will ask, does not
the way in which he is accustomed to regard mountains rather deaden
their poetical influence? Doesn't he come to look at them as mere
instruments of sport, and overlook their more spiritual teaching? Does
not all the excitement of personal adventure and the noisy apparatus of
guides, and ropes, and axes, and tobacco, and the fun of climbing,
rather dull his perceptions and incapacitate him from perceiving

The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills?

Well, I have known some stupid and unpoetical mountaineers; and, since I
have been dismounted from my favourite hobby, I think I have met some
similar specimens among the humbler class of tourists. There are
persons, I fancy, who "do" the Alps; who look upon the Lake of Lucerne
as one more task ticked off from their memorandum book, and count up the
list of summits visible from the Goernergrat without being penetrated
with any keen sense of sublimity. And there are mountainee