No one, since the days of Hellenism, had climbed mountains for the sake of the view--Dante was the first to do it. And although, in ranging heaven, earth, hell, and paradise in the Divina Commedia, he rarely described real Nature, and then mostly in comparisons; yet, as Humboldt pointed out, how incomparably in a few vigorous lines he wakens the sense of the morning airs and the light on the distant sea in the first canto of Purgatorio:
The dawn was vanquishing the matin hour,
Which fled before it,-so that from afar
I recognized the trembling of the sea.
And how vivid this is:
The air
Impregnate changed to water. Fell the rain:
And to the fosses came all that the land
Contain'd not, and, as mightiest streams are wont,
To the great river with such headlong sweep