Mountains at once excite and satisfy an ideal in the soul, which holds kin with the divine in nature. They ennoble life by their majesty and fortify it by their stately beauty. The human mind thirsts after immensity and immutability, and duration without bounds; but it needs some tangible object from which to take its flight, something present to lead to futurity, something bounded from whence to rise to the infinite. “Earth has built the great watch-towers of the mountains, and they lift their heads far up into the sky and gaze ever upward and around to see if the judge of the world comes not.”[94] Their cloud-capped summits are awful in their mysterious shrouds of darkness, and their sudden thunder crashing amid overhanging precipices is often terrible in its shock. With many their gloomy sublimity, hard, jagged, and torn, produces an uncomfortable feeling: Goethe wrote, “Switzerland with its mountains at first made so great an impression upon me that it disturbed and confused me, only after repeated visits did I feel at my ease among them.” There is something inexpressibly interesting in their society, their age, their duration without change, and their majestic repose; their fixed, frozen, changeless glory. The sun rolls his purple tides of light through the air that surrounds their summits, but his beams wake no seed-time and ripen no harvest. The moon and the stars rise and move, and decline along the horizon, century after century, but the sweet vicissitudes of the season and of time move not the sympathies of these pale, stern peaks, over which broods one eternal winter. Upon them the vivifying and ordering syllables of creation seem never to have passed; a realm of chaos reserved to the primeval empire of the _formless_ and the _void_; where there is brilliance without warmth, summer without foliage, and days but no duties. Beneath the overwhelming radiance of a world of light, whose reflection makes every valley beneath them rejoice, these giants flaunt their crowns of snow everlastingly in the very face of the sun. They are so sharply defined and distinct that they seem to be within arm’s reach; apparent nearness, yet a sense of untraversable remoteness, like heaven itself, at once the most distant from us and the nearest. Their angle of elevation, seen from a distance, is very small indeed. Faithfully represented in a drawing, the effect would be insignificant; but their aerial perspective amply restores the proportions lost in the mathematical perspective. “Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery,” and there is no Landseer for Alpine pictures. They are too vast and too simple; and the scene, though its objects are so few, is too expanded for the canvas.