g, and he found
it advisable to dwell at length on the formidable nature of the two
serpents, and on the rage with which they attack their victims, rather
than on the feelings of Laocoon. He only skims over those feelings,
because his first object was to represent a chastisement sent by the
gods, and to produce an impression of terror that nothing could diminish.
If he had, on the contrary, detained our looks on the person of Laocoon
himself with as much perseverance as the statuary, instead of on the
chastizing deity, the suffering man would have become the hero of the
scene, and the episode would have lost its propriety in connection with
the whole piece.

The narrative of Virgil is well known through the excellent commentary of
Lessing. But Lessing only proposed to make evident by this example the
limits that separate partial description from painting, and not to make
the notion of the pathetic issue from it. Yet the passage of Virgil does
not appear to me less valuable for this latter object, and I crave
permission to bring it forward again under this point of view:--

Ecce autem gemini Tenedo tranquilla per alta
(Horresco referens) immensis orbibus angues
Incumbunt pelago, pariterque ad litora tendunt;
Pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta jubaeque
Sanguineae exsuperant undas; pars caetera pontum
Pone legit, sinuatque immensa volumine terga.
Fit sonitus spumante salo, jamque arva tenebant,
Ardentes oculos suffecti sanguine et igni,
Sibila lambebant linguis vibrantibus ora!
Aeneid, ii. 203-211.

We find here realized the first of the three conditions of the sublime
that have been mentioned further back,--a very powerful natural force,
armed for destruction, and ridiculing all resistance. But that this
strong element may at the same time be terrible, and thereby sublime, two
distinct operations of the mind are wanted; I mean two representations
that we produce in ourselves by our own activity. First, we recognize
this irresistible natural force as terrible by comparing it with the
weakness of the faculty of resistance that the physical man can oppose to
it; and, secondly, it is by referring it to our will, and recalling to
our consciousness that the will is absolutely independent of all
influence of physical nature, that this force becomes to us a sublime
object. But it is we ourselves who represent these two relations; the
poet has only given us an object armed with a great fo