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"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 canvas. 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 sentiment, has betrayed a secret consciousness of the unrivalled powers which poetry derives from this latitude in the man

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 humour of Swift and of Arbuthnot has accustomed us to state the TYO and the BAOOE 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

agement of her machinery, in his splendid but exaggerated panegyric on the designs with 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 colouring wrought,
"To local symmetry and life awake.

Το δε μειρακιώδες αντικρὺ ὑπεναντιον τοις 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

passage, which has puzzled several of his commentators not a little, os and Bados, 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 the word altitudo in Latin. Ημιν δε εκεῖνο διαπορητεον εν αρχη, ει εστιν ύψος τις n Bades Tεxvn. 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 aos for Bados. Pearce, on the other hand, translates vos ʼn Bados sublimitas sive altitudo; plainly considering the word Baos as intended by the author, in conjunction with os, 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.*

of the ocean, to plunge them, one after another, into the dirt of Fleetditch:

"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."

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"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."

*Note (Bb).

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.*

"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 recognize, although he may labour in vain to trace any metaphysical principle of connection. 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.

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