“Language which to a severe taste is perhaps a trifle too fine,” is Leslie Stephen’s characteristic comment. “It is not every one,” he adds, with trenchant common sense, “who can with impunity compare Alps to archangels.” Perhaps not, and let us therefore be thankful to the occasional writer, who, like Ruskin and Leslie Stephen himself at his best, is not shamed into dullness by the fear of soaring too high. But Ruskin was something more than a fine writer. No man, and no mountaineer, ever loved the Alps with a more absorbing passion; and, in the whole realm of Alpine literature, there is no passage more pregnant with the unreasoning love for the hills than that which opens: “For to myself mountains are the beginning and the end of all Alpine scenery,” and ends: “There is not a wave of the Seine but is associated in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones and forest pines of Fontainebleau; and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris with the horses’ heads to the south-west, the morning sun flashing on the bright waves at Charenton. If there be no hope or association of this kind, and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying that, perhaps at the next rise of the road, there may be seen the film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the landscape, however beautiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness and pain; and the whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace--nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer--or of the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all--I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady-fern.” George Meredith was no mountaineer; but his mountain passages will not easily be beaten. His description of the Alps seen from the Adriatic contains, perhaps, the subtlest phrase in literature for the colouring of distant ranges: “Colour was steadfast on the massive front ranks; it wavered in its remoteness and was quick and dim _as though it fell on beating wings_.” And no climber has analysed the climber’s conflicting emotions with such sympathetic acuteness. “Would you know what it is to hope again, and have all your hopes at hand? Hang upon the crags at a gradient that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient if just within grasp, as mortal hopes should be.”