Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory

<p>To English poets and writers of the seventeenth century as to their predecessors mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols God’s wrath. Yet less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of mountain splendor of glorious heights that stirred their souls to divine ecstasy. In this very readable and fascinating study Marjorie Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to mountain glory. She examines various writers from the seventeenth eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and traces both the causes and the process of this drastic change in perception.</p>