Must we assume that danger blinded them to the beauty of the Alps? The mountains themselves have not changed. The modern mountaineer sees, from the windows of the Berne express, a picture whose colours have not faded in the march of Time. The bar of silver that thrusts itself above the distant foothills, as the train swings out of the wooded fortress of the Jura, casts the same challenge across the long shadows of the uplands. The peaks are a little older, but the vision that lights the world for us shone with the same steadfast radiance across the plains of long ago. Must we believe that our adventurous forefathers could find nothing but fear in the snows of the great divide? Dangers which have not yet vanished menaced their journey, but the white gleam of the distant snows was no less beautiful in the days when it shone as a beacon light to guide the adventurous through the great barrier down the warmth of Italian lowlands. An age which could face the great adventure of the Crusades for an idea, or more often for the sheer lust of romantic wandering, was not an age easily daunted by peril and discomfort. May we not hope that many a mute, inglorious mountain-lover lifted his eyes across the fields and rivers near Basle or Constance, and found some hint of elusive beauty in the vision that still remains a mystery, even for those who have explored the once trackless snows? Those who have tried to discover the mediæval attitude have too often merely generalised from detached expressions of horror. Passages of praise have been treated as exceptional. The Monk Bremble and the Bishop Berkeley have had their say, unchallenged by equally good evidence for the defence. Let us remember that plenty of modern travellers might show an equally pronounced distaste for mountains. For the defence, we might quote the words of an old traveller borrowed in Coryat’s _Crudities_, a book which appeared in 1611: “What, I pray you, is more pleasant, more delectable, and more acceptable unto a man than to behold the height of hilles, as it were the very Atlantes of heauen? to admire Hercules his pillers? to see the mountaines Taurus and Caucasus? to view the hill Olympus, the seat of Jupiter? to pass over the Alpes that were broken by Annibals Vinegar? to climb up the Apennine promontory of Italy? from the hill Ida to behold the rising of the Sunne before the Sunne appears? to visit Parnassus and Helicon, the most celebrated seates of the Muses? Neither indeed is there any hill or hillocke, which doth not containe in it the most sweete memory of worthy matters.” There is the genuine ring about this. It is the modern spirit without the modern affectations. Nor is this case exceptional. In the following chapter we shall sketch the story of the early Alpine explorers, and we shall quote many passages instinct with the real love for the hills.