Brockes to some extent did.  He described the Harz Mountains in the Fourth Book of his Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Verguengen in Gott); and in his Observations on the Blankenburg Marble he said:  ’In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful, their size delights and appals us’; and wound up a discussion of wild scenery in contrast to cultivated with:  ’Ponder this with joy and reverence, my soul.  The mountain heights wild and beautiful shew us a picture of earthly disorder.’[7] It was very long before expressions of horror and fear entirely disappeared from descriptions of the Alps.  In Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison we read:  ’We bid adieu to France and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty and rocky mountains.  We had left behind us a blooming Spring, which enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers....  Every object which here presents itself is excessively miserable.’  Savoy is ’one of the worst countries under Heaven.’

Addison,[8] on the other hand, wrote of the Alps from Ripaille:  ’It was the pleasantest voyage in the world to follow the windings of this river Inn through such a variety of pleasing scenes as the course of it naturally led us.  We had sometimes on each side of us a vast extent of naked rocks and mountains, broken into a thousand irregular steps and precipices ... but, as the materials of a fine landscape are not always the most profitable to the owner of them, we met with but little corn or pasturage,’ etc.  Lady Mary Wortley[9] Montagu wrote from Lyons, Sept. 25, 1718:  ’The prodigious aspect of mountains covered with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our feet, and the vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused roaring, would have been solemnly entertaining to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.’

On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the eighteenth century.  Many travellers still measured the value of scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,[10] who praised garden-like level country such as that round Mantua, in contrast to the useless wild Tyrolese mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and Lueneburg or Moser,[11] who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), after reading Emilia and La Nouvelle Heloise:  ’The far-famed Alps, about which so much fuss has been made.’

Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and romantic scenery in general.  Isolated voices had expressed some feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature.  He did not, as so many would have it—­Du Bois Reymond, for example—­discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.[12]