that the attention is forcibly roused to the secret workings of thought; but something of the same kind takes place on almost every occasion, when Altitude produces the emotion of Sublimity. In general, whoever examines the play of his imagination, while his eye is employed either in looking up to a lofty eminence, or in looking down from it, will find it continually shifting the direction of its movements;-" glancing," as the poet expresses it, "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven."

Of this mental process we are more peculiarly conscious in reading the descriptions of poetry :

"On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,

With haggard eye, the poet stood.

Loose his beard and hoary hair

Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air."

Of these lines, the two first present a picture which the imagination naturally views from below; the rest transport us to the immediate neighbourhood of the bard, by the minuteness of the delineation.

As an obvious consequence of this rapidity of thought, it may be worth while here to remark, that the conceptions of the Painter, which are necessarily limited, not only to one momentary glimpse of a passing object, but to one precise and unchangeable point of sight, cannot possibly give expression to those ideal creations, the charm of which depends, in a great degree, on their quick and varied succession; and on the ubiquity (If I may be allowed the phrase) of the Poet's eye. No better illustration of this can be produced than the verses just quoted, compared with the repeated attempts which have been made to represent their subject on canvass. Of the vanity of these attempts it is sufficient to say, that, while the painter has but one point of sight, the poet, from the nature of his art, has been enabled, in this instance, to avail himself of two, without impairing, in the least, the effect of his description, by this sudden and unobserved shifting of the scenery.

I cannot help thinking that Gray, while he professes to convey a different sen

In consequence of the play of imagination now described, added to the influence of associations formerly remarked, it is easily conceivable in what manner Height and Depth, though precisely opposite to each other in their physical properties, should so easily accord together in the pictures which imagination forms; and should even, in many cases, be almost identified in the emotions which they produce.

Nor will there appear any thing in this doctrine savouring of paradox, or of an undue spirit of theory, in the judgment of those who recollect, that, although the humor of Swift and of Arbuthnot has accustomed us to state the ὝΨΟΣ and the ΒΑΘΟΣ as standing in direct opposition to each other, yet, according to the phraseology of Longinus, the oldest writer on the subject now extant, the opposite to the sublime is not the profound, but the humble, the low, or the puerile.* In one very remarkable passage, which has puzzled several of his commentators not a little, "yos and ßálos, instead of being stated in contrast with each other, seem to be particularized as two things comprehended under some one common genus, corresponding to that expressed by

timent, has betrayed a secret consciousnes of the unrivalled powers which poetry derives from this latitude in the management of her machinery, in his splendid but exaggerated panegyric on the designs which Mr. Bentley decorated one of the editions of his book. The circumstances he has pitched on as characteristical of the genius of that artist, are certainly those in which the prerogatives of poetry are the most incontestable.

"In silent gaze, the tuneful choir among,

Half pleased, half blushing, let the muse admire,
While Bentley leads her sister art along,

And bids the pencil answer to the lyre.

"See, in their course, each transitory thought,
Fixed by his touch, a lasting essence take;
Each dream, in fancy's airy coloring wrought,
To local symmetry and life awake."

Τὸ δὲ μειρακιώδες ἀντικρὺ ὑπεναντίον τοῖς μεγέθεσι, &c. &c. Sect. 3. When Pope attempted to introduce the image of the profound into poetry, he felt himself reduced to the necessity, instead of representing his dunces as exerting themselves to dive to the bottom of the ocean, to plunge them, one after another, into the dirt of Fleet-ditch :

"The king of dikes! than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood."

"Next Smedley div'd: slow circles dimpled o'er
The quaking mud, that clos'd and op❜d no more."

"Then Hill essay'd: scarce vanish'd out of sight,
He buoys up instant, and returns to light:
He bears no token of the sable streams,
And mounts aloft among the swans of Thames."

the word altitudo in Latin. Ημῖν δὲ ἐκεῖνο διαπορητέον ἐν ἀρχῇ, εἰ ἐστὶν ὕψους τις ἢ βάθους τέχνη. Smith, in his English version, omits the second of these words entirely; acknowledging that he could not make sense of the passage as it now stands; and intimating his own approbation of a conjectural emendation of Dr. Tonstal's, who proposed (very absurdly, in my opinion,) to substitute άoos for Báoos. Pearce, on the other hand, translates vos Báoos sublimitas sive altitudo; plainly considering the word Báoos as intended by the author, in conjunction with yos, to complete that idea which the Greek language did not enable him to convey more concisely. As Pearce's translation is, in this instance, adopted, without the slightest discussion or explanation, by the very acute and learned Toup, in his edition of Longinus, it may be considered as also sanctioned by the high authority of his name.*

The stress which the authors of Martinus Scriblerus have laid upon Sublimity, in the literal sense of the word, together with the ludicrous parallel which they have so happily kept up between the art of rising, and the art of sinking, has probably had no inconsiderable effect in diverting the graver critics who have since appeared, from an accurate examination of those obvious analogies and natural associations, which can alone explain some of the most perplexing difficulties connected with the object of our present inquiry.†

Note (B b.)

"The Sublime of nature is the sky, the sun, moon, stars, &c. The profound of nature is gold, pearls, precious stones, and the treasures of the deep, which are inestimable as unknown. But all that lies between these, as corn, flowers, fruits, animals, and things for the mere use of man, are of mean price, and so common as not to be greatly esteemed by the curious." Art of Sinking in Poetry, chap. vi.

CHAPTER SECOND.

GENERALIZATIONS OF THE WORD SUBLIMITY, IN CONSEQUENCE OF THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATIONS.

BESIDE the circumstances already mentioned, a variety of others conspire to distinguish Sublimity or Altitude from all the other directions in which space is extended; and which, of consequence, conspire to invite the imagination, on a correspondent variety of occasions, into one common track. The idea of Sublimity which is, in itself, so grateful and so flattering to the mind, becomes thus a common basis of a great multitude of collateral associations; establishing universally, wherever men are to be found, an affinity or harmony among the different things presented simultaneously to the thoughts; an affinity, which a man of good taste never fails to recognise, although he may labor in vain to trace any metaphysical principle of connexion. It is in this way I would account for the application of the word sublimity to most, if not to all the different qualities enumerated by Mr. Burke, as its constituent elements; instead of attempting to detect in these qualities some common circumstance, or circumstances, enabling them to produce similar effects. In confirmation of this remark, I shall point out very briefly, a few of the natural associations attached to the idea of what is physically or literally Sublime, without paying much attention to the order in which I am to arrange them.

It will contribute greatly to assist my readers in following me through this argument, always to bear in mind, that the observations which I am to offer neither imply any dissent, on my part, from the critical decisions of former writers, nor tend to weaken, in the smallest degree, the authority of their precepts, so far as they are founded on a just induction of particulars. A universal association furnishes a basis of practice, as solid and as independent of the caprice of fashion as a meta

hysical affinity or relation; and the investigation of the former is a legitimate object of philosophical curiosity no less than the latter. In the present instance, I am disposed to assent to most of the critical conclusions adopted both by Mr. Burke and by Mr. Price; and were the case otherwise, I should be cautious in opposing my own judgment to theirs, on questions so foreign to my ordinary pursuits, how freely soever I may have presumed to canvass the opinions which they have proposed on some other points of a more speculative and abstract nature.

Of all the associations attached to the idea of Sublimity, the most impressive are those arising from the tendency which the religious sentiments of men, in every age and country, have had to carry their thoughts upwards towards the objects of their worship. To what this tendency is owing, I must not at present stop to inquire. It is sufficient for my purpose, if it be granted, (and this is a fact about which there cannot well be any dispute) that it is the result of circumstances common to all the various conditions of mankind. In some cases, the heavens have been conceived to be the dwelling place of the gods; in others, the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies, have themselves been deified; but, in all cases, without exception, men have conceived their fortunes to depend on causes operating from above. Hence those apprehensions which, in all ages, they have been so apt to entertain, of the influence of the Stars on human affairs. Hence, too, the astrological meaning of the word ascendant, together with its metaphorical application to denote the moral influence which one Mind may acquire over another.* The lan

In the following line of Ennius, Jupiter and the Starry Sublime are used as synonymous expressions:

"Aspice hoc sublime candens, quem invocant omnes Jovem."

It is observed by Sir William Jones, that "the JUPITER or DIESPITER, here mentioned by Ennius, is the Indian God of the visible heavens, called INDRA, or the King, and Divespiter, or Lord of the Sky; and that most of his epithets in Sanscrit are the same with those of the Ennian Jovɛ.—His weapon is the thunderbolt; he is the regent of winds and showers; and though the East is peculiarly under his care, yet his Olympus is Meru, or the North pole, allegorically represented as a mountain of gold and gems.”—(Dissertation on the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India.)

The same natural association has evidently suggested the towering forms so com