Dear mountains! my own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?
Chapter 7 · Victor Frankenstein
Context
Approaching Geneva, Victor addresses the landscape directly, asking the mountains and lake whether their beauty signals peace or cruel indifference to his suffering.
Analysis
Victor's rhetorical questions trap him in a paranoid double bind: nature must be either promising or mocking, but he cannot accept that it might simply be indifferent. The apostrophe ("Dear mountains!") attempts to force the landscape into relationship, to make it acknowledge him, but the final question admits that beauty itself has become ambiguous—it could mean anything, or nothing.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Victor projects agency onto nature because he cannot bear meaninglessness—his need to read the landscape as either comforting or hostile reveals his Romantic assumption that the universe must be about him, an assumption the novel quietly dismantles.