roaring, would have been solemnly entertaining to me, if I had
suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.'

On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. Many travellers still measured the value of
scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,[10] who praised
garden-like level country such as that round Mantua, in contrast to
the useless wild Tyrolese mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and
Lüneburg or Moser,[11] who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), after
reading _Emilia_ and _La Nouvelle Héloise_: 'The far-famed Alps,
about which so much fuss has been made.'

Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and
romantic scenery in general. Isolated voices had expressed some
feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and
gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature.
He did not, as so many would have it--Du Bois Reymond, for
example--discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the
Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed
it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.[12]

In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape
before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental
and erotic pastorals. He opened up again for his country the taste
for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the idyllic, and,
above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under artificiality
and false taste.

The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for
country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of