Rarely in the long period between Waller and Wordsworth do we find any trace of the modern feeling toward mountains. If they are spoken of at all it is to indicate the difficulty in surmounting them or to express the general distaste for anything so savagely and untamably wild. It is interesting to note that passages expressing the most active dislike of mountains show really some close observation and a good deal of picturesque energy of phrase. They were evidently the outcome of a personal experience, the unpleasantness of which demanded forcible epithets. They show that when men were compelled by the exigencies of travel to go into a mountainous region there was not wanting a perception of certain characteristic mountain qualities, but that these qualities were only those exciting repulsion and terror. In no case does a sense of the sublimity and beauty of mountains find, or even apparently seek, expression. This is true in travels, fiction, biography, and letters, as well as in poetry. A few typical illustrations may be given. Howell, who went abroad twice before 1622, strikes the keynote of the travelers who came later. He distinctly objected to the “monstrous abruptness” of the “Pyereny Hills” and he found the Alps even more “high and hideous.” He was obliged to admit that the Welsh mountains were but mole-hills compared to the Alps, but he thought the scale more than turned by the fact that those “huge, monstrous excrescences of nature” were entirely useless, while “Eppint and Penminmaur” at least furnished grass for the cattle.[33] John Evelyn regarded the Alps chiefly as an unpleasant barrier between the “sweete and delicious” gardens of France and the corresponding topiary paradises of Italy, and his final conception of them is as the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear the Plains of Lombardy.[34] Addison was another of these early travelers, and he, too, found the journey over the Alps most trying. The “irregular, misshapen scenes” of a mountainous region gave him little pleasure.[35] He preferred the safe monotony of plains. Both Evelyn and Addison expended all the descriptive energy they had to spare for mountains on Vesuvius, but it was, of course, its character as a striking and curious natural phenomenon that attracted them.[36] Burnet of the Charter House, the tutor of Lady Mary Pierrepont, in his “Theory of the Earth” gives a theological reason for the existence of mountains. He conceives the present world as a gigantic ruin, the result of sin. Originally the earth was perfectly smooth. “It had the beauty of youth and blooming nature, fresh and fruitful, and not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture in all its body; no rocks nor mountains, no hollow caves, nor gaping channels, but even and uniform all over. And the smoothness of the earth made the face of the heavens so too; the air was calm and serene; none of those tumultuary motions and conflicts of vapours, which the winds cause in ours.