SOURCE: Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, Cornell, 1959, 403 p.

In the following excerpt from her full-length study of the "aesthetics of the infinite" Nicolson discusses eighteenth-century concepts of the sublime and identifies Young as a perfect example of a poet of the sublime.

… "When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch," wrote Alfred North Whitehead, "do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicity to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them."³⁷ We shall remember Whitehead's words as we seek the causes of the change in mountain attitudes that began to take place sometime...