The early literature of the mountains has an atmosphere which has largely disappeared in modern Alpine writing. For, to the pioneers of Alpine travel, a mountain was not primarily a thing to climb. Even men like Bourrit and Ramond de Carbonnière, genuine mountaineers in every sense of the term, regarded the great heights as something more than fields for exploration, as the shrines of an unseen power that compelled spontaneous worship. These men saw a mountain, and not a problem in gymnastics. They wrote of mountains with a certain naïve eloquence, often highly coloured, sometimes a trifle bombastic. But, because the best of them had French blood in their veins, their outpourings were at least free from Saxon self-consciousness. They were not writing for an academic audience lenient to dullness, but convulsed with agonies of shame at any suspicion of fine writing. One shudders to think of Bourrit delivering his sonorous address on the guides of Chamounix as the high priests of humanity before the average audience that assembles to hear an Alpine paper. We have seen two old gentlemen incapacitated for the evening by a paper pitched on a far more subdued note. Yet, somehow, the older writings have the genuine ring. They have something lacking in the genial rhapsodies of their successors. “We can never over-estimate what we owe to the Alps”: thus opens a characteristic peroration to an Alpine book of the ’eighties. “We are indebted to them and all their charming associations for the greatest of all blessings, friendship and health. It has been conclusively proved that, of all sports, it is the one which can be protracted to the greatest age. It is in the mountains that our youth is renewed. Young, middle-aged, or old, we go out, too often jaded and worn in mind and body; and we return invigorated, renewed, restored, fitted for the fresh labours and duties of life. To know the great mountains wholly is impossible for any of us; but reverently to learn the lessons they can teach, and heartily to enjoy the happiness they can bring is possible to us all.”