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"The ploughman homewards plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me"

"me" here meaning (probably unintentionally) the aesthete, the poet. There was a longing for the stability of country life, as well there might be in an age of instability: enclosure, industrial revolution, urbanisation. It is natural that people should have sought reassurance; and seek it still; for the Picturesque thrives just as well in the twentieth century and beyond. It is profoundly rooted in the urban European psyche. Its criteria remain pretty much the same; Roland Barthes writes:

"Among the views elevated by the Guides Bleus to aesthetic existence we rarely find plains (redeemed only when they can be described as fertile) never plateaux. Only mountains, gorges, defiles and torrents can have access to the pantheon of travel in as much as they seem to encourage a morality of effort and solitude."

It is easy to make fun of the Picturesque and its essentially urban optic. In his essay Wordsworth in the Tropics, Aldous Huxley asks whether the poet would have been able to assert his benign and pantheistic view of nature if he had had to survive amidst snakes and earthquakes rather than the "cosy sublimities" of the Lake District.

But at the same time as the Picturesque movement a more dramatic aesthetic category was being elaborated (deriving from Greek aesthetic writings via Edmund Burke). This category was the Sublime, (which Kant described as "an outrage on the imagination".) It was a precursor of Romanticism, especially as applied to landscape, seeking in landscape dramatic contrast and extremes. The distinction between this and the Picturesque (with which it is usually coupled) is clear in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: "Soon after I entered the valley of Chamounix. This valley is more wonderful and sublime, but not so beautiful and picturesque, as that of Servox….Immense glaciers approached the road; I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche, and marked the smoke of its passage."

When Boswell leaves Edinburgh for London he says farewell to Arthur's seat, "that lofty, romantic mountain".

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