If they look like paradise for three months in the summer,
they are a veritable inferno for the other nine; and I should like to
condemn my mountain-worshipping friends to pass a whole year under
the shadow of Snowdon, with that great black head of his shutting out
the sunlight, staring down into their garden, overlooking all they do
in the most impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at them with rain,
hail, snow, and bitter freezing blasts, even in the hottest sunshine.
A mountain? He is a great stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in his
head, whose highest ambition is to give you one also. As for his
beauty, no natural object has so little of its own; he owes it to the
earthquakes that reared him up, to the rains and storms which have
furrowed him, to every gleam and cloud which pass over him. In
himself he is a mere helpless stone-heap. Our old Scandinavian
forefathers were right when they held the mountain Yotuns to be
helpless pudding-headed giants, the sport of gods and men: and their
English descendant, in spite of all his second-hand sentiment, holds
the same opinion at his heart; for his first instinct, jolly honest
fellow that he is, on seeing a snow alp, is to scramble up it and
smoke his cigar upon the top.
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