, completely
from himself; and he feels the sublimity in a contemplative state:
he can feel it in no other. Nor is that state incompatible with a
consciousness of peril, though it can never be with personal terror.
And, if it is meant that we should have a positive, present
conviction that we are in no danger, this we must deny, as we find it
contradicted in innumerable instances. So far, indeed, is a sense of
security from being essential to the condition of a sublime emotion,
that the sense of danger, on the contrary, is one of its most exciting
accompaniments. There is a fascination in danger which some persons
neither can nor would resist; which seems, as it were, to disenthral
them of self;--as if the mysterious Infinite were actually drawing
them on by an invisible power.

Was it mere scientific curiosity that cost the elder Pliny his life?
Might it not have been rather this sublime fascination? But we have
repeated examples of it in our own time. Many who will read this may
have been in a storm at sea. Did they never feel its sublimity while
they knew their danger? We will answer for ourselves; for we have been
in one, when the dismasted vessels that surrounded us permitted no
mistake as to our peril; it was strongly felt, but still stronger was
the sublime emotion in the awful scene. The crater of Vesuvius is even
now, perhaps for the thousandth time, reflecting from its lake of fire
some ghastly face, with indrawn breath and hair bristling, bent, as by
fate, over its sulphurous brink.

Let us turn to Mont Blanc, that mighty pyramid of ice, in whose shadow
might repose all the tombs of the Pharaohs. It rises before the
traveller like the accumulating mausoleum of Europe: perhaps he looks
upon it as his own before his natural time; yet he cannot away from
it. A terrible charm hurries him over frightful chasms, whose blue
depths seem like those of the ocean; he cuts his way up a polished
precipice, shining like steel,--as elusive to the touch; he creeps
slowly and warily around and beneath huge cliffs of snow; now he looks
up, and sees their brows fretted by the percolating waters like a
Gothic ceiling, and he fears even to whisper, lest an audible breath
should awaken the avalanche: and thus he climbs and climbs, till the
dizzy summit fills up his measure of fearful ecstasy.

Now, though cases may occur where the emotion in question is attended
with a sense of security, as in the reading or hearing the descrip