Early writers on the sublime repeatedly connected sublime landscapes with religion: Joseph Addison, On the Pleasures of the Imagination, 1712: ‘A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.’ Thomas Gray, Letters, 1739: ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument.’ Thomas Cole, Essay on American Scenery, 1835: ‘Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator – they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation
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