’Twas suited to a golden age, and to the first innocency of nature.” But as a punishment for sin the interior fluid of the earth was allowed to break through the beautiful smooth crust, and in the ensuing chaos were piled up those “wild, vast, and indigested heaps of stone and earth,” those “great ruins” that we call mountains.[37] In 1715 Pennecuik said that the swelling hills of Tweeddale were, for the most part, green, grassy, and pleasant, but he objected to the bordering mountains as being “black, craigie, and of a melancholy aspect, with deep and horrid precipices, a wearisome and comfortless piece of way for travellers.”[38] In 1756 Thomas Amory commented on the “dreadful northern fells,” and called Westmoreland a “frightful country,” and spoke of “the ranges and groups of mountains horrible to behold.”[39] So late as 1773 Dr. Johnson said of the Highlands of Scotland: “An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her care.”[40] In the same year Hutchinson deprecates the “dreary vicinage of mountains and inclement skies” in the Lake District. He describes Stainmore thus: “As we proceeded Spittle presented its solitary edifice to view; behind which Stainmore arises, whose heights feel the fury of both eastern and western storms; ... a dreary prospect extended to the eye; the hills were clothed in heath, and all around a scene of barrenness and deformity.... All was wilderness and horrid waste over which the wearied eye travelled with anxiety.... The wearied mind of the traveller endeavours to evade such objects, and please itself with the fancied images of verdant plains, purling streams, and happy groves.”[41] The attitude toward mountains in the passages already referred to appears in the poetry of the period with the same general tone, though with less insistence. Throughout Waller’s poetry the only epithets applied to mountains are “savage”[42] and “craggy.”[43] Marvell, the most genuine lover of Nature in this age, was yet of the age in his feeling toward mountains, for he characterizes them as ill-designed excrescences that deform the earth and frighten heaven, and he calls upon them to learn beauty from the soft access and easy slopes of a well-rounded hill.[44] The unpleasant phrase, “high, huge-bellied mountains”[45] in one of Milton’s youthful poems is hardly atoned for by the lines in “L’Allegro,” Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest,[46]