Marjorie Hope Nicholson, a Columbia University professor who pioneered innovative approaches coupling science and literature in the 1940s, focused part of her research on the significance of mountains in aesthetics and the history of civilizations. In 1948, a year before the publication of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Nicholson gave a series of lectures on how mountains had been the subject of diametrically opposed emotions. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory documented these transitions in the perception of English poets throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Among them, the work of Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) aroused particular interest due to his posing paradoxically contrasting reflections on the mountains, oscillating between outspoken denigrating criticism—describing mountains as ‘nature’s rubbish’—to moments of their great aesthetic exaltation. Walks across the Alps always stirred a sense of awe in him and indeed one of the sublime, standing before the spectacular magnificence of those mountain peaks that seem to touch the sky.
