The Alps “filled her mind with sublime emotions.” The solitary grandeur of these scenes both “assisted and soothed the melancholy of her heart.” The stillness and total seclusion of the scene, the stupendous mountains, the gloomy grandeur of the woods, “diffuse a sacred enthusiasm over the mind and awaken sensations truly sublime.” Such a scene “fills the soul with emotions of indescribable awe, and seems to lift it to a nobler nature.” “It was in the tranquil observation of beautiful nature” that Clara’s mind recovered its tone. The moonlight on the sea seemed to “diffuse peace.” Twilight sometimes “inspires the mind with pensive tenderness,” sometimes “exalts it to sublime meditations.” The Alps inspire reflections that “soften and elevate the heart and fill it with the certainty of a present God.” Such expressions were repeated with an insistence that becomes monotonous. There is, indeed, an element of sameness in all the descriptions, an effect the more tiresome because they are so numerous. So large a descriptive element would hardly be admitted in a novel today unless justified by some remarkable power of word-painting. Mrs. Radcliffe’s descriptions would doubtless invite the modern reader, at least after a steady progress through four or five volumes, to do some judicious skipping. But thought of as in her own day, Mrs. Radcliffe must always rank as a discoverer, so new and fresh was this element she brought into fiction. As is usual with discoverers she overworked her idea. She was not a great genius. She was often weakly sentimental. But she had a genuine and most ardent love of Nature, and, when at her best, had exceptional descriptive power. Her fame and her influence on succeeding literature rest on these characteristics. In “Fiction,” as in “Travels” and “Poetry,” there is the transfer of interest from what man does or is, to the powers of untrammeled Nature. The new spirit here, as in “Travels,” is late in finding adequate expression. We can hardly put any real beginnings of it earlier than “John Buncle” (1756–66). Even after that, development is spasmodic and slow. In most of the novels and romances we find the romantic impulse to see strange lands, but men and manners absorb the attention of the travelers. Mrs. Radcliffe’s fugitives in “The Romance of the Forest,” the travelers in “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” and Mrs. Brooke’s soldier in “Emily Montague” are the first to make much of the scenery through which they pass.