azed.
I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and
Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things
from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes towards Italy, whither
my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to
rise close by, although they were really at a great distance.... The
Bay of Marseilles, the Rhone itself, lay in sight.'

It was a very modern effect of the wide view that '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 towards his native country: he opened a book
which was then his constant companion, _The Confessions of St
Augustine_, and his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter:

And men go about 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. His feeling had suddenly changed.

He knew, when he began the climb, that he was doing something very
unusual, even unheard of among his contemporaries, and justified
himself by the example of Philip V. of Macedon, arguing that a young
man of private station might surely be excused for what was not
thought blamable in a grey-haired king. Then on the mountain top,
lost in the view, the passage in St Augustine suddenly occurred to
him, and he started blaming himself for admiring earthly things so
much. 'I was amazed ... angry with myself for marvelling but now at
earthly things, when I ought to have learnt long ago that nothing
save the soul was marvellous, and that to the greatness of the soul
nought else was great'; and he closed with an explanation flavoured
with theology to the taste of his confessor, to whom he was writing.
The mixture of thoroughly modern delight in Nature[8] with ascetic
dogma in this letter, gives us a glimpse into the divided feelings of
one who stood upon the threshold between two eras, mediaeval and
modern, into the reaction of the mediaeval mind against the budding
modern feeling.

This is, at any rate, the first mountain ascent for pleasure since
Hellenic days, of which we have detailed information. From Greece
before Alexander we have nothing; but the Persian King Darius, in his
expedition against the Scythians in the regi