When a man spends a day walking in hilly country he is often astonished at the new shape taken on by a mountain when it is looked at from a new point of view. Sometimes the change is so great as to make it almost unrecognizable. He who has seen Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant to admit that what he sees from Llanberis is the same mountain: he who has seen the Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed at their beauty as he gazes at them from the garden at Low Wood. These are extreme cases. But to a less degree every traveller among the mountains is experiencing the same thing all day. He finds the eternal hills the most plastic of forms. At each change in his own position there is a change in the shape of a mountain under which he is passing. He may keep his eye fixed upon it but insensibly, as he watches, the long {8} chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged precipice a round green slope. Much the same process goes on as the generations of men pass on their way, with their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, on the great human heights of their own and earlier days. Many of these look great only when you are close to them. At a little distance they are seen to be small and soon they disappear altogether. The true mountains remain but they do not keep the same shape. Each succeeding generation sees the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which includes them all. Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it feels that they belong not to their own generation only but to all time and so to itself. It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its predecessors have said about them. It needs to see them again freshly for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own attitude towards them.