nce and truth. But there is more, for (as we have seen)
language is spontaneous; it constitutes an act before it registers an
observation. It gives vent to emotion before it is adjusted to things
external and reduced, as it were, to its own echo rebounding from a
refractory world. The lion's roar, the bellowing of bulls, even the
sea's cadence has a great sublimity. Though hardly in itself poetry, an
animal cry, when still audible in human language, renders it also the
unanswerable, the ultimate voice of nature. Nothing can so pierce the
soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. There is no utterance so
thrilling as that of absolute impulse, if absolute impulse has learned
to speak at all. An intense, inhospitable mind, filled with a single
idea, in which all animal, social, and moral interests are fused
together, speaks a language of incomparable force. Thus the Hebrew
prophets, in their savage concentration, poured into one torrent all
that their souls possessed or could dream of. What other men are wont to
pursue in politics, business, religion, or art, they looked for from one
wave of national repentance and consecration. Their age, swept by this
ideal passion, possessed at the same time a fresh and homely vocabulary;
and the result was an eloquence so elemental and combative, so
imaginative and so bitterly practical, that the world has never heard
its like. Such single-mindedness, with such heroic simplicity in words
and images, is hardly possible in a late civilisation. Cultivated poets
are not unconsciously sublime.

[Sidenote: Its exclusiveness and narrowness.]

The sublimity of early utterances should not be hailed, however, with
unmixed admiration. It is a sublimity born of defect or at least of
disproportion. The will asserts itself magnificently; images, like
thunder-clouds, seem to cover half the firmament at once. But such a
will is sadly inexperienced; it has hardly tasted or even conceived any
possible or high satisfactions. Its lurid firmament is poor in stars. To
throw the whole mind upon something is not so great a feat when the
mind has nothing else to throw itself upon. Every animal when goaded
becomes intense; and it is perhaps merely the apathy in which mortals
are wont to live that keeps them from being habitually sublime in their
sentiments. The sympathy that makes a sheep hasten after its fellows, in
vague alarm or in vague affection; the fierce premonitions that drive a
bull to the heifer; the