Ye toppling crags of ice! Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
He had the nature-mystic's thirst for a touch of the untamed power of Nature, for communion with the magnificence of death, shaking the mountain with wind and falling snow, with leaping rock and earth-eating
torrent. Such would fain die that they may experience the joys of being possessed by Nature. For they have entered on the marriage of life and death, heaven and hell, and out of the roaring cataclysm of destruction they rise winged with a new life.
Whilst the poets chant the awful power of the distant mountain, Byron comes to us out of the mountain, fashioned by its force, intoxicated by the wine of its wild life. Mountain climbers meet with strange and unexpected bedfellows in the course of their wanderings. In his cry for the baptism of the wild winds of the mountain, Matthew Arnold approaches Byron closely—
Ye storm-winds of Autumn
Shelley sings exquisitely of its grandeur, its ceaseless motion; he voices the wonderment of man before the complex problem of Mont Blanc. But his mind has never participated in the revels on the mountain, he has not lost and barely recovered his soul in adventurous crevasses. He retains something of the old horror of the desolate heights—