J.J.  Grasser wrote of Rhoetia[5]:  ’There are marble masses projecting, looking like walls and towers in imitation of all sorts of wonderful architecture.  The villages lie scattered in the valleys, here and there the ground is most fruitful.  There is luxuriance close to barrenness, gracefulness close to dreadfulness, life close to loneliness.  The delight of the painter’s eye is here, yet Nature excels all the skill of art.  The very ravines, tortuous foot-paths, torrents, alternately raging and meagre, the arched bridges, waves on the lakes, varied dress of the fields, the mighty trees, in short, whatever heaven and earth grant to the sight, is an astonishment and a pastime to the enraptured eye of the wanderer.’

But this pastime depended upon the contrast between the charming valleys and the dreadful mountains.

Joseph Furttenbach (1591) writing about the same district of Thusis, described ’the little bridges, under which one hears the Rhine flowing with a great roar, and sees what a horrible cruel wilderness the place is.’  In Conrad Gessner’s De admiratione Montium (1541)[6] a passage occurs which shews that even in Switzerland itself in the sixteenth century one voice was found to praise Alpine scenery in a very different way, anticipating Rousseau.  ’I have resolved that so long as God grants me life I will climb some mountains every year, or at least one mountain, partly to learn the mountain flora, partly to strengthen my body and refresh my soul.  What a pleasure it is to see the monstrous mountain masses, and lift one’s head among the clouds.  How it stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which the Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of creation!  How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who only crawl about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures!  The earthly paradise is closed to them.’

Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century, travellers were to be found who thought the Alps ‘dreadful’ (I refer to Chateaubriand’s ’hideux’), so such praise as this found no echo in its own day.

But with the eighteenth century came a change.  Travelling no longer subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror.

Modern methods began with Scheuchzer’s (1672-1733) Itinera Alpina.  Every corner of the Alps was explored—­the Splugen, Julier, Furka, Gotthard, etc.—­and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants examined.  Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain beauty.