“You are in the centre of a whole district of desolation, suggesting a landscape from Greenland, or an imaginary picture of England in the glacial epoch, with shores yet unvisited by the irrepressible Gulf Stream. The charm of such views--little as they are generally appreciated by professed admirers of the picturesque--is to my taste unique, though not easily explained to unbelievers. They have a certain soothing influence like slow and stately music, or one of the strange opium dreams described by De Quincey. If his journey in the mail-coach could have led him through an Alpine pass instead of the quiet Cumberland hills, he would have seen visions still more poetical than that of the minister in the ‘dream fugue.’ Unable as I am to bend his bow, I can only say that there is something almost unearthly in the sight of enormous spaces of hill and plain, apparently unsubstantial as a mountain mist, glimmering away to the indistinct horizon, and as it were spell-bound by an absolute and eternal silence. The sentiment may be very different when a storm is raging and nothing is visible but the black ribs of the mountains glaring at you through rents in the clouds; but on that perfect day on the top of the Schreckhorn, where not a wreath of vapour was to be seen under the Whole vast canopy of the sky, a delicious lazy sense of calm repose was the appropriate frame of mind. One felt as if some immortal being, with no particular duties upon his hands, might be calmly sitting upon those desolate rocks and watching the little shadowy wrinkles of the plain, that were really mountain ranges, rise and fall through slow geological epochs.” Whymper never touches this note even in the best of many good mountain passages. His forte was rather the romance of Alpine adventure than the subtler art of reproducing Alpine scenery. But in his own line he is without a master. His style, of course, was not so uniformly good as Stephen’s. He had terrible lapses. He spoils his greatest chapter by a most uncalled-for anti-climax. He had a weakness for banal quotations from third-rate translations of the classics. But, though these lapses are irritating, there is no book like the famous _Scrambles_, and there is certainly no book which has sent more new climbers to the Alps. Whymper was fortunate, for he had as his material the finest story in Alpine history. Certainly, he did not waste his chances. The book has the genuine ring of Alpine romance. Its pages are full of those contrasts that are the stuff of our mountain quest, the tragic irony that a Greek mind would have appreciated. The closing scenes in the great drama of the Matterhorn move to their appointed climax with the dignity of some of the most majestic chapters in the Old Testament. Of their kind, they are unique in the literature of exploration.