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Show 122. Beyond that was a difference of imagination between Tyndall's sharp scientific eye and Ruskin's desire for the spirit of mystery. "Where Tyndall was 'all concentration,* Ruskin tended to be diffuse," Henry James thought, and he was right in locating their conflict in point of view. Tyndall was above all the champion of close and even microscopic inspection. King followed this scientific tradition, despite his inclination toward a Romantic view of mountains. He was drawn to the thinking of both Ruskin and Tyndall, struggled between the scientific and Ruskinian aesthetic views. He could relax, as he did sometimes in Mountaineering: No tongue can tell the relief to simply withdraw scientific observation, and let Nature impress you in the dear old way with all her mystery and glory, with those vague indescribable emotions which tremble between wonder and sympathy. But this kind of pleasure was a diversion, and finally King found that "Alpine literature, once lifted above the fatiguing repetition of gymnastics, is almost invariably scientific." Aesthetic views, King thought, were archaic. Ruskin helped the reader to know Ruskin, not the Alps: The varying hues which mood and emotion forever pass before his own mental vision mask with their illusive mystery the simple realities of nature, until mountains and their bold natural facts are lost behind the cloudy poetry of the writer. So, when King looked off from the summit of Mount Tyndall, |