“Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother. Above these again, changeless since the world’s beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud, lay out the eternal snow. They could see blots and blurs on its face where storm and wandering wullie-wa got up to dance. Below them, as they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds; below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the mothers of young Sutluj.” Then there is Mr. Algernon Blackwood, who is, I think, rather a ski-runner than a mountaineer. Certainly he has unravelled the psychology of hill-wandering, and discovered something of that strange personality behind the mountains. No writer has so successfully caught the uncanny atmosphere that sometimes haunts the hills. The contrast is even more marked in poetry than in prose. In prose, we have half-a-dozen Alpine books that would satisfy a severe critic. In poetry, only one mountaineer has achieved outstanding success. Mr. G. Winthrop Young, alone, has transferred the essential romance of mountaineering into poetry which not mountaineers alone, but every lover of finished craftsmanship, will read with something deeper than pleasure. But, while Mr. Young has no rival in the poetry of mountaineering, there is a considerable quantity of excellent verse of which mountains are the theme. We have spoken of Shelley and Byron. Among more modern poets there is Tennyson. He wrote little mountain poetry, and yet in four lines he has crystallised the whole essence of the Alpine vision from some distant sentinel of the plains-- “How faintly flushed, how phantom fair Was Monte Rosa, hanging there A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys And snowy dells in a golden air.” Sydney Dobell has some good mountain verse; and if we had not already burdened this chapter with quotations we should have borrowed from those descriptions in which Morris clearly recalls the savage volcanic scenery of Iceland. Swinburne, in the lines beginning-- “Me the snows That face the first of the morning”-- has touched some of the less obvious spells of hill region with his own unerring instinct for beauty. F. W. H. Myers in eight lines has said all that need be said when the hills have claimed the ultimate penalty--