The latest phase of the modern passion for impersonal nature includes even its most dismal and awe-inspiring aspects, with an ecstatic predilection that would have seemed incomprehensible to an ancient Greek. This phase has been thus beautifully described by Ruskin: “There is a sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, colour-depth, and morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it—with other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be analysed by extreme care—is found to the full only in five men that I know of in modern times; namely, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and myself, differing totally and in the entire group of us from the delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti, and separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Scott, by its unaccountable _affection_ for ‘Rokkes blok’ and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans, which to Shakspere were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to climb or cross,—all this love of impending mountains, coiled thunderclouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky, almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmettes, gulphs of Spezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and close brushwood at Coniston.” Ruskin flatters himself if he still imagines he is the sole living possessor of this feeling. Though there is much hypocrisy and guide-book-star-admiration among tourists, there are yet unquestionably hundreds who enjoy the Via Malas, the ice-oceans and solitary Swiss valleys they visit; and though their dismal delight may not be so intense as Ruskin’s, it is yet sufficient to indicate the growth of a general affection for impersonal nature in all her moods, whether smiling or frowning. To a mind that can thus rise above human associations and utilities, the sublimest thing in the world is the absolute solitude of an Alpine summit. To the ignorant peasant the harsh cow-bell which interrupts this silence is sweet music, because it suggests the abodes of mankind; and on this primitive stage of æsthetic culture Jeffrey placed himself when he wrote that, “It is man, and man alone, that we see in the beauties of the earth which he inhabits.”