He knew, when he began the climb, that he was doing something very unusual, even unheard of among his contemporaries, and justified himself by the example of Philip V. of Macedon, arguing that a young man of private station might surely be excused for what was not thought blamable in a grey-haired king.  Then on the mountain top, lost in the view, the passage in St Augustine suddenly occurred to him, and he started blaming himself for admiring earthly things so much.  ’I was amazed ... angry with myself for marvelling but now at earthly things, when I ought to have learnt long ago that nothing save the soul was marvellous, and that to the greatness of the soul nought else was great’; and he closed with an explanation flavoured with theology to the taste of his confessor, to whom he was writing.  The mixture of thoroughly modern delight in Nature[8] with ascetic dogma in this letter, gives us a glimpse into the divided feelings of one who stood upon the threshold between two eras, mediaeval and modern, into the reaction of the mediaeval mind against the budding modern feeling.

This is, at any rate, the first mountain ascent for pleasure since Hellenic days, of which we have detailed information.  From Greece before Alexander we have nothing; but the Persian King Darius, in his expedition against the Scythians in the region of Chalcedon, ascended the mountain on which stood the Urios temple to Zeus, and there ’sitting in the temple, he took a view of the Euxine Sea, which is worthy of admiration.’ (Herodotus.)

Philip V. of Macedon ascended the Haemus B.C. 181, and Apollonios Rhodios describes the panorama spread out before the Argonauts as they ascended the Dindymon, and elsewhere recalls the view from Mt.  Olympus.  These are the oldest descriptions of distant views conceived as landscape in the classic literature preserved to us.  Petrarch’s ascent comes next in order.

This sentimental and subjective feeling for Nature, half-idyllic, half-romantic, which seemed to arise suddenly and spontaneously in Petrarch, is not to be wholly explained by a marked individuality, nourished by the tendencies of the period; the influence of Roman literature, the re-birth of the classic, must also be taken into account.  For the Renaissance attitude towards Nature was closely allied to the Roman, and therefore to the Hellenic; and the fact that the first modern man arose on Italian soil was due to the revival of antiquity plus its union with the genius of the Italian people.  Many direct analogies can be traced between Petrarch and the Roman poets; it was in their school that his eyes opened to the wonders of Nature, and he learnt to blend the inner with the outer life.

Boccaccio does not lead us much further.  There is idyllic quality in his description of a wood in the Ameto,[9] and especially in Fiammetta, in which he praises country life and describes the spring games of the Florentine youth.