'Something evermore about to be'
The Matterhorn
Finding another world – and ourselves - in the mountains.
In the 19th century, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Ruskin went to the Alps, which had seemed to earlier travellers like a terrifying wasteland, and returned with accounts of the sublime.
Yesterday, our friend Lena Lencek described the presence of a powerful mountain, and wrote -
To become aware of this subtle interaction between the natural setting and the private strands of our biographies was, for me, a passage into experiencing the sort of linkages of which William Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude of 1805, Book 6, describing the effect of his first encounter with the Swiss Alps.. . .when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world. . .
Lena has the whole passage and a beautiful meditation.
David describes the first ascent of the Matterhorn and the astonishing Brit who survived it.
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