to that of the sage Augustus: "When did
ever a sublime thought spring up in the soul that melancholy was not
to be found, however latent, in its neighbourhood?" Now, with due
deference to Mr. Moore, this is a very sickly piece of nonsense,
that has not even an atom of truth to stand on. "God said, Let
there be light, and there was light!"--we should like to know where
lies the melancholy of that sublime sentence. "Truth," says Plato,
"is the body of God, and light is his shadow." In the name of
common-sense, in what possible corner in the vicinity of that lofty
image lurks the jaundiced face of this eternal bete noir of Mr.
Moore's? Again, in that sublimest passage in the sublimest of the
Latin poets (Lucretius), which bursts forth in honour of Epicurus,
is there anything that speaks to us of sadness? On the contrary, in
the three passages we have referred to, especially in the two first
quoted, there is something splendidly luminous and cheering. Joy is
often a great source of the sublime; the suddenness of its ventings
would alone suffice to make it so. What can be more sublime than
the triumphant Psalms of David, intoxicated as they are with an
almost delirium of transport? Even in the gloomiest passages of the
poets, where we recognize sublimity, we do not often find
melancholy. We are stricken by terror, appalled by awe, but seldom
softened into sadness. In fact, melancholy rather belongs to
another class of feelings than those excited by a sublime passage or
those which engender its composition. On one hand, in the loftiest
flights of Homer, Milton, and Shakspeare, we will challenge a critic
to discover this "green sickness" which Mr. Moore would convert
into the magnificence of the plague. On the other hand, where is
the evidence that melancholy made the habitual temperaments of those
divine men? Of Homer we know nothing; of Shakspeare and Milton, we
have reason to believe the ordinary temperament was constitutionally
cheerful. The latter boasts of it. A thousand instances, in
contradiction to an assertion it were not worth while to contradict,
were it not so generally popular, so highly sanctioned, and so
eminently pernicious to everything that is manly and noble in
literature, rush to our memory. But we think we have already quoted