Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics)

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics)

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. When we look at a majestic scene in nature, it is hard to believe that our appreciation of its beauty would have been completely foreign to an observer four centuries ago. In Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Marjorie Hope Nicolson argues that the rise of an aesthetic appreciation of nature's grandeur in English writing did not originate with exposure to Italian landscape painting, Orientalism, or the concept of the sublime in art, as have been postulated. Rather, Nicolson demonstrates a direct line of sentiment from Henry More, to Thomas Burnet, John Dennis, Anthony Shaftesbury, and Joseph Addison, and then to the Romantics, in which modern concepts such as infinity and regularity gradually develop into an acceptance of the magnificence of nature as a reflection of God. Originally published in 1959, this book's reprinting demonstrates the importance of its standing in the history of aesthetic ecological thought. " Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory has long been recognized by landscape historians and nature writers as a dazzling work of cultural history: fresh and original in its argument and acute in its critical intelligence. But it is also a wonderful adventure in reading, an exhilarating hike through the peaks and valleys of western modern sensibility."―Simon Schama, author of Landscape and Memory " Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory is a unique work of cultural history. I know of no book that provides a comparably lucid, well―documented, compelling demonstration of the far―reaching cultural consequences of changes in scientific conceptions of the universe. . . Nicolson demonstrates the power of abstract scientific thought to alter ideas, feelings, and, indeed, the very texture of human experience."―Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America "This seminal work on nature and the sublime will remain a classic and a source of inspiration for generations to come."―Barbara Novak, author of Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 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.