more fearfully and wonderfully made; while as for his grandeur of
form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of his
shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and
more grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient
prudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the truly
divine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living men
and women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is an
idolatry baser than that of the old Canaanites; for they had the
courage to go up to the mountain tops, and thence worship the host of
heaven: but we are to stay at the bottom, and worship the mountains
themselves. Byron began the folly with his misanthropic "Childe
Harold." Sermons in stones? I don't believe in them. I have seen a
better sermon in an old peasant woman's face than in all the Alps and
Apennines of Europe. Did you ever see any one who was the better for
mountains? Have the Alps made * * * a whit honester, or * * * a whit
more good-natured, or Lady * * * a whit cleverer? Do they alter one
hair's breadth for the better the characters of the ten thousand male
and female noodles who travel forth to stare at them every year? Do
mountains make them lofty-minded and generous-hearted? No. Caelum,
non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt. Don't talk to me of the
moral and physical superiority of mountain races, for I tell you it
is a dream. Civilization, art, poetry, belong to the lowlands. Are
the English mountaineers, pray, or the French, or the Germans? Were
the Egyptians mountaineers, or the Romans, or the Assyrians, as soon
as they became a people? The Greeks lived among mountains, but they
took care to inhabit the plains; and it was the sea and not the hills
which made them the people which they were. Does Scotland owe her
life to the highlander, or to the lowlander? If you want an
experimentum crucis, there is one. As for poetry, will you mention
to me one mountain race which has written great poetry? You will