[PW] Mont Blanc quotation

[Dennis Lien]

At 07:33 AM 6/27/2008, you wrote:
>Hudson & Kennedy climbed Mont Blanc by a new route in 1855.  When asked if 
>their view from the summit repaid their labour, they replied with the 
>following quote:
>
>"Though steep the track,
>The mountain top will overpay, when climb'd
>The scaler's toil."
>
>The three lines are indented and placed in single quotation 
>marks.  However, no attribution is given for the lines.
>
>The same three lines appear in an earlier book about the same 
>subject:  "Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc, on the 
>Eight and Ninth of August, 1827," by John Auldjo, Esq. of Trinity College, 
>Cambridge.  I have the second edition of this book, published in London, 
>in 1830.
>
>Auldjo's quotation differs from the other one only slightly: 
>"mountain-top" is hyphenated.
>
>He gives no credit to the original author, but he also puts the three 
>lines in double quotation marks.
>
>I have been trying to find the author, and it does NOT appear in "The Yale 
>Bok of Quotations."


We have the (subscription-based) English Poetry Database, and I found the
quotation there as part of the poem "To the Honourable and Reverend F. C."

I was in some confusion still about the authorship:  EPD shows it on pp. 208+
of POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS by John Whaley (1745), where nothing indicates it to
be a translation, but EPD also shows it in a 1763 anthology, A COLLECTION OF
POEMS IN SIX VOLUMES, BY SEVERAL HANDS (published for and edited by Dodsley),
where in volume 6, page 139, it is ascribed to Sneyd Davies (but with same 
title).

Googling the poem's title brings up some hits on William Hazlitt discussing it
as the work of Sneyd Davies.  And the OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY
entry on Davies said that while he never collected his poems himself, "some
appeared, initialled S.D., in collections (1732 and 1745) by his school and
college friend John Whaley; nine were reprinted in Dodsley's Collection (v5
and 6, 1758).

So: the answer is Sneyd Davies (1709–1769) in his "To the Honourable and
Reverend F.C.," first published in the 1745 collection by his friend John
Whaley which I cite above and probably more easily findable in the Dodsley
multivolume anthology also cited above.

In the poem, the track to the mountain's top is a metaphor for the poet
being lured on by his ambition (e.g., not a literal mountain in the original).


Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu