Misty Mountain Hop

The shift from Romantic ideals in the nineteenth century America can be understood by the discovery of the beauty of mountains. Previously, mountains had been a sign of God’s abandonment of man, areas better left to spiritual exile. Hardly picturesque, they were markers of the absence of civilization and the division between God and man. With the Romantic era, the beauty of mountains was discovered. In a time when solitude and wildness because of the mechanization of society by industrialization, mountains became a source of spiritual development, a pristine getaway from the harsh realities of modern civilization, and a source of purity. Their source of seclusion is also their doom as everybody was trying to find it. The era of mass romanticism is now meeting up with its inherent contradictions. Everybody is trying to find seclusion where everybody else is, thereby ruining the pristine seclusion people were trying to find in the first place. The romantic ideals of rugged individuality, self-reliance, and harmony with the land are ruined by the golf courses and poorly planned housing developments sucking water out of places where there was none and the raping of lands to pull out resources that sooner or later will become obsolete.