a passage occurs which shews that even in Switzerland itself in the
sixteenth century one voice was found to praise Alpine scenery in a
very different way, anticipating Rousseau. 'I have resolved that so
long as God grants me life I will climb some mountains every year, or
at least one mountain, partly to learn the mountain flora, partly to
strengthen my body and refresh my soul. What a pleasure it is to see
the monstrous mountain masses, and lift one's head among the clouds.
How it stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which
the Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of
creation! How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who
only crawl about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The
earthly paradise is closed to them.'

Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century,
travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer
to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in
its own day.

But with the eighteenth century came a change. Travelling no longer
subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the
occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a
new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to
explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first
admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror.

Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) _Itinera Alpina_.
Every corner of the Alps was explored--the Splugen, Julier, Furka,
Gotthard, etc.--and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants
examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as
theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain