The journey to the mountaintop

October 20. 

Think not your journey

to the mountantop is lost

that you have no glass.

Many a man, when I tell him that I have been on to a mountain, asks if I took a glass with me. No doubt, I could have seen further with a glass, and particular objects more distinctly, - could have counted more meeting-houses; but this has nothing to do with the peculiar beauty and grandeur of the view which an elevated position affords. 

It was not to see a few particular objects, as if they were near at hand, as I had been accustomed to see them, that I ascended the mountain, but to see an infinite variety far and near in their relation to each other, thus reduced to a single picture.

The facts of science, in comparison with poetry, are wont to be as vulgar as looking from the mountain with a telescope. It is a counting of meeting-houses.

At the public house, the mountain-house, they keep a glass to let, and think the journey to the mountaintop is lost, that you have got but half the view, if you have not taken a glass with you.

 H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 20, 1852

As vulgar as looking from the mountain with a telescope.  See March 13, 1854 ("Bought a telescope to-day");  January 31, 1855 ("As I passed the mouth of Larned Brook, off Wayland meeting-house, I pulled out my glass and saw that it was 12.30 o’clock."); March 18, 1858 ("I sit on the Cliff, and look toward Sudbury. I see its meeting-houses and its common, and its fields lie but little beyond my ordinary walk, but I never played on its common nor read the epitaphs in its graveyard, and many strangers to me dwell there. How distant in all important senses may be the town which yet is within sight! We see beyond our ordinary walks and thoughts. With a glass I might perchance read the time on its clock.")