To English poets and writers of the seventeenth century, as to their
predecessors, mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature
and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols God's wrath.
Yet, less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of
mountain splendor, of glorious heights that stirred their souls to
divine ecstasy. In this very readable and fascinating study, Marjorie
Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the
seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to
mountain glory. She examines various writers from the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and traces both the causes and the
process of this drastic change in perception.