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And, in
the next place, your mind is far better adapted to receive impressions
of sublimity when you are alone, in a silent region, with a black sky
above and giant cliffs all round; with a sense still in your mind, if
not of actual danger, still of danger that would become real with the
slightest relaxation of caution, and with the world divided from you by
hours of snow and rock.
I will go no further, not because I have no more to say, but because
descriptions of scenery soon become wearisome, and because I have, I
hope, said enough to show that the mountaineer may boast of some
intellectual pleasures; that he is not a mere scrambler, but that he
looks for poetical impressions, as well as for such small glory as his
achievements may gain in a very small circle. Something of what he gains
fortunately sticks by him: he does not quite forget the mountain
language; his eye still recognises the space and the height and the
glory of the lofty mountains. And yet there is some pain in wandering
ghostlike among the scenes of his earlier pleasures.


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