Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory

Download or read book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory written by Marjorie Hope Nicolson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.