| Description |
Taoist hermit, T'ao Hung-ching (452-536) asserts near the close of the fifth century that "Men have always spoken and will always speak of the beauty of mountains and streams. High peaks that go soaring into the clouds: translucent torrents, clear to their very bottoms, flanked on either side by cliffs of stone, whose fivefold colors glitter in the sun: green forests and bamboos of kingfisher blue, verdant through every season of the year. As the mists of dawn roll aside, the birds and monkeys cry discordantly. As the evening sun sinks to rest, the fishes vie at leaping from their deep pools. Here is the true Paradise of the Region of Earthly Desires." Yet as reflection of universal poetry will show, 'men' have NOT 'always spoken of mountain beauty.' In fact, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, states that Western poets, until the eighteenth century, labeled mountains as "Nature's Shame and Ills upon the otherwise fair face of Nature." Names such as "Warts, Wens, Pimples, Blisters, Imposthumes and Pock-holes" were also common epithets for the heightened crags. She concludes that "for hundreds of years most people who climbed mountains climbed them fearfully, grimly, resenting the necessity, and only on rare occasions suggesting the slightest aesthetic gratification." |
