m a
child; and differs in every respect from the tranquil, vegetative, and
prosaic affection with which the same ploughed land and poplars would be
regarded by a native of the Netherlands.

The vague expression which I have just used--"intellectual lead," may be
expanded into four great heads; lead in Religion, Art and Literature,
War, and Social Economy.

Sec. 12. It will be right to examine our subject eventually under these
four heads; but I shall limit myself, for the present, to some
consideration of the first two, for a reason presently to be stated.

1st. Influence of mountains on religious temperament.

I. We have before had occasion to note the peculiar awe with which
mountains were regarded in the middle ages, as bearing continual witness
against the frivolity or luxury of the world. Though the sense of this
influence of theirs is perhaps more clearly expressed by the mediaeval
Christians than by any other sect of religionists, the influence itself
has been constant in all time. Mountains have always possessed the
power, first, of exciting religious enthusiasm; secondly, of purifying
religious faith. These two operations are partly contrary to one
another: for the faith of enthusiasm is apt to be _im_pure, and the
mountains, by exciting morbid conditions of the imagination, have
caused in great part the legendary and romantic forms of belief; on the
other hand, by fostering simplicity of life and dignity of morals, they
have purified by action what they falsified by imagination. But, even in
their first and most dangerous influence, it is not the mountains that
are to blame, but the human heart. While we mourn over the fictitious
shape given to the religious visions of the anchorite, we may envy the
sincerity and the depth of the emotion from which they spring: in the
deep feeling, we have to acknowledge the solemn influences of the hills;
but for the erring modes or forms of thought, it is human wilfulness,
sin, and false teaching, that are answerable. We are not to deny the
nobleness of the imagination because its direction is illegitimate, nor
the pathos of the legend because its circumstances are groundless; the
ardor and abstraction of the spiritual life are to be honored in
themselves, though the one may be misguided and the other deceived; and
the deserts of Osma, Assisi, and Monte Viso are still to be thanked for
the zeal they gave, or guarded, whether we find it in St. Francis and
St. Dominic,