in thy
imagination will both sunsets be--and though it will sometimes retire
into the recesses of thy memory, and lie there among the unsuspected
treasures of forgotten imagery that have been unconsciously accumulating
there since first those gentle eyes of thine had perfect vision given to
their depths--yet mysteriously brought back from vanishment by some one
single silent thought, to which power has been yielded over that bright
portion of the Past, will both of them sometimes reappear to thee in
solitude--or haply when in the very heart of life. And then surely a few
tears will fall for sake of him--then no more seen--by whose side thou
stoodest, when that double sunset enlarged thy sense of beauty, and made
thee in thy father's eyes the sweetest--best--and brightest
poetess--whose whole life is musical inspiration--ode, elegy, and hymn,
sung not in words but in looks--sigh-breathed or speechlessly distilled
in tears flowing from feelings the farthest in this world from grief.

So much, though but little, for the beautiful--with, perhaps, a tinge of
the sublime. Are the two emotions different and distinct--think'st thou,
O! metaphysical critic of the gruesome countenance--or modifications of
one and the same? 'Tis a puzzling question--and we, Sphinx, might wait
till doomsday, before you, Oedipus, could solve the enigma. Certainly
a Rose is one thing and Mount Aetna is another--an antelope and an
elephant--an insect and a man-of-war, both sailing in the sun--a little
lucid well in which the fairies bathe, and the Polar Sea in which
Leviathan is "wallowing unwieldy, enormous in his gait"--the jewelled
finger of a virgin bride, and grim Saturn with his ring--the upward eye
of a kneeling saint, and a comet "that from his horrid hair shakes
pestilence and war." But let the rose bloom on the mouldering ruins of
the palace of some great king--among the temples of Balbec or Syrian
Tadmor--and in its beauty, methinks, 'twill be also sublime. See the
antelope bounding across a raging chasm--up among the region of eternal
snows on Mont Blanc--and deny it, if you please--but assuredly we think
that there is sublimity in the fearless flight of that beautiful
creature, to whom nature grudged not wings, but gave instead the power
of plumes to her small delicate limbs, unfractured by alighting among
the pointed rocks. All alone, by your single solitary self, in some
wide, lifeless desert, could you deny sublimity to the unlooked-fo