The Alps

To the purely Alpine traveller, Volcanoes are not a matter of interest, because there does not exist a single volcano in the Alps, nor, so far as I am aware, even the ruins of o...

Relatively few Alpine climbers of the present generation know the Alps. They know a district or two, perhaps, though even that amount of knowledge is not so common as might be e...

Mountains do not merely vary from district to district, but from time to time. Were it not so, how soon should we tire of any single outlook or the neighbourhood of any one cent...

In a previous chapter reference has been made to the varied types of scenery which belong to different divisions of the Alpine chain, and the briefest kind of characterisation o...

"Old as the hills" is not a comparison that would be considered apt if invented to-day, for we now know that, geologically speaking, the greatest mountain ranges are of recent e...

A peak is primarily a thing to be looked at. It was only after the aspect of peaks had smitten the imagination of men that the desire to climb them arose. The climbing impulse i...

It is to be feared that the reader, whose persistence has availed to carry him thus far through the adventure of this book, may bring an accusation against me, on the ground tha...

Incidentally, in the course of the preceding chapters, glaciers have been frequently referred to, but they form so prominent a feature in Alpine scenery as to demand a chapter a...

I have borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent book, recently published, called _How to Look at Pictures_. The natural man might suppose that such were ques...

It has often occurred to me, when travelling over glaciers and among mountains, seldom or never before visited by men, how much the impression they produce upon a first spectato...

In the chequer-boards of most men's lives, the squares they can allot to the joys of mountain travel are coincident with summer seasons. Thus most of us cannot know the snow mou...

John Ruskin, in a fine and famous passage, describes the effect of a first view of the Alps upon a young and sensitive mind. He was at Schaffhausen with his parents. "We must ha...