the hands of a great artist, it becomes one of the most powerful
auxiliaries to a sublime end. All that we contend for is that sympathy
alone is insufficient as a cause of sublimity.

There are yet other sources of the false sublime, (if we may so call
it,) which are sometimes resorted to also by poets and painters; such
as the horrible, the loathsome, the hideous, and the monstrous: these
form the impassable boundaries to the true Sublime. Indeed, there
appears to be in almost every emotion a certain point beyond which we
cannot pass without recoiling,--as if we instinctively shrunk from
what is forbidden to our nature.

It would seem, then, that, in relation to man, Beauty is the extreme
point, or last summit, of the natural world, since it is in that that
we recognize the highest emotion of which we are susceptible from the
purely physical. If we ascend thence into the moral, we shall find its
influence diminish in the same ratio with our upward progress. In the
continuous chain of creation of which it forms a part, the link above
it where the moral modification begins seems scarcely changed, yet the
difference, though slight, demands another name, and the nomenclator
within us calls it Elegance; in the next connecting link, the moral
adjunct becomes more predominant, and we call it Majesty; in the next,
the physical becomes still fainter, and we call the union Grandeur; in
the next, it seems almost to vanish, and a new form rises before us,
so mysterious, so undefined and elusive to the senses, that we turn,
as if for its more distinct image, within ourselves, and there, with
wonder, amazement, awe, we see it filling, distending, stretching
every faculty, till, like the Giant of Otranto, it seems almost to
burst the imagination: under this strange confluence of opposite
emotions, this terrible pleasure, we call the awful form Sublimity.
This was the still, small voice that shook the Prophet on
Horeb;--though small to his ear, it was more than his imagination
could contain; he could not hear it again and live.

It is not to be supposed that we have enumerated all the forms of
gradation between the Beautiful and the Sublime; such was not our
purpose; it is sufficient to have noted the most prominent, leaving
the intermediate modifications to be supplied (as they can readily be)
by the reader. If we descend from the Beautiful, we shall pass in like
manner through an equal variety of forms gradually modified by the