A generation or two later came the first real explorers of our hills, and left behind them a record of their sensations in language which makes very curious reading nowadays. It is difficult to recognise in their precipices the gentle slopes of Skiddaw and Helvellyn. We cannot see things through their eyes. It is easy to laugh at their extravagant expressions, but perhaps after all theirs was the Golden Age of English Mountaineering. They left the valleys where men dwell with the adventurous expectation of voyagers on uncharted seas. As they rose step by step they became conscious, as never before, of towering height and unplumbed depth. And when they went home and told the tale of their adventures, there was no unimpressionable critic to accuse them of exaggerating the height here or the angle of inclination there.
However, this happy period was short-lived. With the exploration of the higher Alps mountaineering terms began to acquire a new meaning. Only quite steep slopes were now called precipices, and words like ‘perpendicular’ began to have a definite objective meaning. British hills were no longer regarded as too mountainous to climb. Instead, they were dismissed as not mountainous enough to be worth climbing. But this, too, was only a phase, which passed away in its turn as the feeling for mountains became more general. Men began to look in their home hills for something at least of that which they found in the Alps, and they were not disappointed. Indeed, the mountain feeling became at last so little limited that the mountain lover could find in every hill some realisation of his longings, and he might say, with a perversion of the old tag about humanity: ‘I am a man; all that is of the mountains I count akin to myself.’
Is this, too, only a phase? A great mountaineer, writing not so very long ago, gave it as his opinion that the sport of mountaineering in the Alps was already on the decline. He may not have been right--surely he cannot have been right. But if even the high Alps are in danger of vulgarisation, what may not be the fate of our British hills? The great god Pan is very gracious to his worshippers, but not when they come in crowds. One by one his haunts are discovered and laid bare, his chosen sanctuaries are called by uncouth names, even his beloved fennel is catalogued in the list of mountain flora. The oreads of to-day, if there were any, would be pointed out like chamois, and would probably suffer the common fate of everything which is rare and beautiful.