looker-on is cultivated in many seats of industry, where a degree of orderliness and finish beyond the actual necessities of the case, is given to all the apparatus concerned. We see this in the trimness of a well-kept house, a cotton-mill, or a shop, and in the rigorous discipline and high condition of a man-of-war. Cleanliness is based originally upon the removal of matters intrinsically injurious, and loathsome to the sense. Going one step farther, it aims at giving lustre, brilliancy, or pure whiteness of surface, where those constitute pleasing effects, taking care to wipe off whatever stains a naturally fine surface. The polishing of tools has both an original effect of brilliancy, and the derived pleasure of suggested ease. The neat, tidy, and trim, gratifies us as a part of Order, and, even when non-essential to practical industry, gives evidence of a mind alive to the importance of this great subsidiary. It would be absurd to go the length of some writers in affirming that beauty always implies mind; but it is a fact of sober observation, that objects are often interesting, from their suggesting to the beholder useful mental qualities. The reverse also holds. Two or three pieces of chopped straw on a carpet, or a small hole in a stocking, would not interfere with any useful operation, or impair the lustre of any other present beauty; but by suggesting a mind loose and indifferent to orderly qualities, on which so much is dependent on the whole, a great offence may be given to the observer.

27. Of the Sublime. This quality has been generally accounted more simple than Beauty. And justly so, for it is principally a result of the one attribute of superior Power. We have already traced the associations of Power, in Support, and in the Esthetic of Utility. These become sublime by elevation in degree. The objects of sublimity are, for the most part, such aspects and appearances as betoken great might, energy, or vastness, and are thereby capable of elating the mind with a borrowed sentiment of power. The feeling of our own might is expanded for the moment by sympathy with the might displayed to our view. The towering Alpine summits, the starry concave, the vast ocean, the

volcanic fires, the hurricane's fury, impress us with an ideal emotion of transcendent power, which has come to receive the name of sublimity. So enjoyable is the sense of power, that we welcome every mode of making it present. When we have it not in the actual, through manifested energy of our own, we seek for it in the ideal by witnessing the energy displayed around us. The great effects produced in the world are compared in our minds with effects of ours, and we transfer to ourselves in some vague fashion, a sense of the mighty agency that is supposed to be at work. This gives birth to a pleasurable elation of the kind arising from power, in a mind suited to that particular mode of stimulation. When fully and fairly manifested, we have in it all the characters of a highly pleasurable emotion; being, however, of the ideal stamp, there is liable to accompany it a sort of boundless craving for indescribable enlargements of one's scope and condition, sometimes termed the sentiment of the Infinite, which introduces a certain element of pain from the conflict with the actual. It is an essential component of the Religious feeling.

28. In touching upon a few of the leading varieties of the sentiment, the first thing that offers itself to our notice is the sublime of Support. We have already seen what opportunity gravity affords, for the putting forth of either a resisting might or a propelling power. Our own unceasing experience tells us, that every elevation of matter above the ordinary level. demands an expenditure of force; and consequently wherever we see lofty piles, we imagine the superhuman energy that raised them. An upheaved mountain mass, and a projectile shot high in air, equally suggest a mighty operating cause. Mere height is thus an incident of sublimity; the earth's surface being our standard, we suppose everything above the common level carried there, and maintained in its place, by some exertion of power. Accordingly, the forms of elevated masses that are most sublime are the lofty and precipitous, as implying the most intense effort of supporting might. Precipitous depth below the surface has the same effect, and from the same causes; by comparison with the bottom of a deep pit,

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239 the surface of the ground appears sustained at an elevated height.

29. The Sublimity of Space is vastness, magnitude, or expanse. It has been supposed that this, and not power, is the fundamental fact of the material sublime. There can be no great material agency without a certain amplitude of space; but sublimity may appear within a comparatively small compass, by virtue of the intensity of the forces at work. A lion, a steam engine, a nine-pounder gun, a smelting furnace, a sixty feet cataract, are sublime, although their space dimensions are not great. Still, every natural agent or effect is magnified according as it is extended; the Amazons river is sublime by its width and volume of water; Etna is sublime from the amplitude of its base, as well as from its height, both qualities conspiring to determine the force of upheaval represented by it. Extent of space implies corresponding energy to traverse, compass, or occupy it.

But irrespective of active energy, space is sublime from the mere volume or magnitude of its contents. The mind is filled, and as it were distended, with voluminous sensation and feeling; and the large body of agreeable emotion has an elevating effect. There is an exact parallel in sound; voluminous sounds, as of a great multitude, a full band, the thunder, the winds, the roar of the sea, exercise a similar power. A mountain prospect is sublime, not from mere extent of vacuity, but, from embracing within a single glance a large area of solid ground with all its activities, interests, and associations; the volume of feeling is of the highest order. Nor can we entirely separate the notion of power in the strictest sense from a vast prospect; the epithet 'commanding' implies that we have a superiority of intellectual range, with the resulting elation of conscious might. As regards the Sublimity of Space, therefore, we have to admit both Voluminous Sensation, and the Sentiment of Power, the two also suggesting and supporting each other. The starry expanse is the crowning grandeur of space to a mind that can in some degree enter into the amplitude of its dimensions.

Not,

30. Greatness of Time has an effect of Sublimity. however, mere duration in the abstract, but time as filled with known transactions and events, which, when suggested in mass, have the elating influence of the voluminous. Here, too, there is the accompaniment of intellectual power from the vast survey of the lapse of centuries. The mere ability to grasp, in one conception, the destinies of many generations elevates us with a species of intellectual might, no less than the wide-reaching prospect of peopled cities. Hence those objects that are able to remind us forcibly of a far by-gone time, or a distant future, affect us with the sublimity of Duration. The relics of ancient empires, the antiquities of the Geological ages,-waken up this sentiment in the reflecting mind, and the more so that the memory is able to recall the intermediate events. A tinge of melancholy and pathos is natural to the retrospect of so many scenes of desolation, and the extinction of so many hopes.

The relations of Terror to the Sublime, have been much discussed. The two were treated by Burke as cause and effect but if the sublime gives the elation of power, and fear depresses the energy, they must be mutually destructive. Incidental to the sublime, there may be a depressing feeling of our own littleness and dependence, but so far as this operates, it will detract from, and not constitute, the agreeable elation of the sublime. In an object of worship, both sentiments coexist, but either would be more strongly manifested in the absence of the other.

31. Without dwelling, as I might, on the associations and adjuncts of sublimity-the sound of the hurricane and the thunder, the wreck caused by a storm, the remnants of a battle-field, or a conflagration-we may notice the case of the sublime of Human Character. This is obviously allied with great power or energy. Any human being that towers

'The same considerations appear to me to throw a satisfactory light on that intimate connexion between the ideas of Sublimity and of Energy which Mr. Knight has fixed on as the fundamental principle of his theory. The direction in which the energies of the human mind are conceived to be ex

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above his fellows in force, resolution, courage, or endurance, strikes the spectator with an exalted idea of power. We are for a moment ideally elevated by the contemplation of heroic human beings, and are in some measure worked upon, and permanently influenced, by their great example. Superior intellect also affects us with the sentiment in question. Such minds as Newton and Aristotle, Homer and Shakspeare,-are the standing wonder and admiration of the human race, and it is the custom to illustrate them by comparisons with everything great, lofty, or vast in the external world.

Human power is the true and literal sublime, and the point of departure for the sublimity of power in all other things. Nature, by a bold analogical stretch, is assimilated to humanity, and clothed with mental attributes; and then, far outstripping human limitations, it elevates us beyond the level of our kind.

erted will, of course, be in opposition to that of the powers to which it is subjected; of the dangers which hang over it; of the obstacles which it has to surmount in rising to distinction. Hence the metaphorical expressions of an unbending spirit; of bearing up against the pressure of misfortune; of an aspiring or towering ambition; and innumerable others. Hence, too, an additional association, strengthening wonderfully the analogy, already mentioned, between Sublimity and certain Moral qualities; qualities which, on examination, will be found to be chiefly those recommended in the Stoical School; implying a more than ordinary energy of mind, or what the French call Force of Character. In truth Energy, as contradistinguished from Power, is but a more particular and modified conception of the same idea; comprehending the cases where its sensible effects do not attract observation; but where its silent operation is measured by the opposition it resists, or by the weight it sustains. The brave man, accordingly, was considered by the Stoics as partaking of the sublimity of that Almighty Being who puts him to the trial; and whom they conceived as witnessing with pleasure the erect and undaunted attitude in which he awaits the impending storm, or contemplates the ravages which it has spread around him. Non video quid habeat in terris Jupiter pulchrius, quam ut spectat Catonem, jam partibus non semel fractis, stantem nihilominus inter ruinas publicas rectum.'-(Seneca, de Providentia, I. 6.)

'It is this image of mental energy, bearing up against the terrors of overwhelming Power, which gives so strong a poetical effect to the description of Epicurus in Lucretius; and also to the character of Satan, as conceived by Milton.'-Stewart, Essay on the Sublime, Chap. III.

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