Excerpt from Some of Our English PoetsGray, in a letter to his mother, dilates on the beauty of the crags and precipices, which lent boldness to the scenery, with a warmth of language which proves him to have been a loving observer of Nature in her most sublime and grandest moods.From a letter to West, written in Turin nine days later, we discover that Gray's thoughts still lingered among the wonders he had left behind.I own I have not as yet [he wrote] anywhere met with those grand and simple works of art that are to amaze one, and whose sight one is to be the better for, but those of nature have astonished me beyond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits here at noonday. You have Death perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed as to com pose the mind without frighting it. I am well persuaded that St. Bruno was a man of no common genius to choose such a situation for his retirement, and perhaps I should have been a disciple of his had I been born in his time.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.