Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory : The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite

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 of 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.Nicolson, Marjorie Hope is the author of 'Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory : The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite', published 2003 under ISBN 9780758106865 and ISBN 0758106866.