Only to spirit can spirit be intelligible. The shining of the Eternal-its richness, nobleness, purity, will be lost upon us, without an inward appetite therefor. To find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, else a world-wide search will not discover it. To the unkindled mind the face of nature is darkness, and art is void of charm. 'He,' says Lord Jeffery, 'will always see the most beauty whose affections are warmest and most exercised, whose imagination is the most powerful, and who has the most accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he is surrounded.' To a Wordsworth, the meanest thing that grows gives thoughts too deep for tears.

Sensibility to the beautiful-competence to feel the invisible in the visible, is a liberalizing and civilizing power. The more of it, as thus defined, is ever the more of the true. The higher and more varied its culture, the more is the culture of the intellect drawn in and constrained. Its stimulating sunshine refines, purifies, and expands the moral feelings also, just as companionship with the ugly, false, and vicious, corrupts, stupefies, and degrades them. To the action of every other faculty it imparts vividness and grace. Highly gifted with it, men become creative, upborne and inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame. Without it, science is cramped and poor, religion is narrow, life unripened and fractional.

The nature of man, indeed, from childhood, and from the humblest conditions, seems, as it were, ever to cry aloud for some sign or token of what is beautiful in some of the many spheres of mind or sense. But too often the fructifying instinct languishes and dies, because overlaid by the nicknacks and other rubbish of Vanity Fair, because of the too hard stress of bodily want, or the pressure of excessive business. Men postpone their manhood till they have an estate, then find that the estate rides them. They

eat and drink, that they may afterward execute the ideal. 'Would it not be better,' says Emerson, 'to begin higher up,- to serve the ideal before they eat and drink, to serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful.'

CHAPTER XIV.

ESTHETICS OF EXPRESSION-THE SUBLIME.

The soul is naturally elevated by the true sublime, and, lifted up with exultation, is filled with transport and inward pride.- LONGINUS.

The beautiful has reference to the form of an object, and the facility with which it is comprehended. For beauty, magnitude is an impediment. Sublimity, on the contrary, requires magnitude as its condition, and the formless is not unfrequently sublime. - SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON.

ANY

NY object, thought, or emotion, which conveys an impression of surpassing greatness or power, is sublime. The tempest-tossed ocean, the roaring and impassable cataract, the shout of a multitude, eclipses, thunder, and abysses, depth beyond depth of the starry heavens, lands swept with hurricanes, the wide expanse of earth, barren with moor or waving with corn and forest, stand, with other similar scenes, in the first rank of material sublimity. Unflinching courage, towering ambition, victory over self, uncommon intrepidity and perfect composure in some critical and high situation, as devotion to truth in defiance of popular fury, or the deliberate measurement of the death-doom, are types of sublimity in the moral world. Of this description are the historic words of Cæsar to the terrified pilot, 'What fear you? You carry Cæsar'; of Hildebrand, who, dying at Salerno after a long and bitter struggle, said, 'I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile'; of Luther on departing for Worms, ‘Though there were as many devils in Worms as tiles on the housetops, still I would enter'; of Raleigh, as he felt the edge of the axe before laying his head on the block, ‘It is a

sharp remedy, but will cure all diseases'; of Sidney, as he motioned away the water to the expiring soldier, 'Thy necessity is greater than mine'; of Gilbert, going down at sea, Never mind, we are as near heaven at sea as ashore'; of Nelson, on the eve of battle, 'England expects every man to do his duty'; of Napoleon, 'Soldiers, from the summits of yonder pyramids forty centuries look down upon you'; of the martyred Latimer to his companion at the stake, as the lighted faggots were brought, 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'

Every one is conscious that the effect produced by the contemplation of such things is peculiar-pleasurable, indeed, but altogether of the serious kind, marked even by a degree of awfulness and solemnity at its height; an elevation and expansion of the mind much above and beyond its ordinary state. Thus a chief test of the sublime is that it banishes littleness of thought and feeling. In the domain of the physical, most objects of sublimity, it will be readily seen, excite emotions of a mixed nature, humiliation and awe, perhaps, or aspiring purpose, overcoming the timid and feeble, rousing the lofty and daring. Witness the exultation of Byron in an Alpine thunderstorm:

The sky is changed!— and such a change! O Night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,

Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light

Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

And this is in the night:- Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be

A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,—
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,—and now, the glee

Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain mirth,

As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. It will be understood from these remarks that the leading elements of the sublime, or sources of its accompanying emotion, are, externally, the vast and illimitable, darkness, obscurity, and silence, which last three ideas affect powerfully the imagination, as is fully exemplified in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, particularly in these lines:

Still as a slave before his lord,

The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the moon is cast.

Also in Campbell's Last Man :

Earth's cities had no sound nor tread,

And ships were drifting with the dead
To shores where all was dumb.

And in this noble passage of Job:

In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face, the hair of my flesh stood up: it stood still; but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes; there was silence; and I heard a voice-Shall mortal man be more just than God?'

If to these elements of sublimity we add spiritual heroism, self-sacrifice, Promethean endurance, martyr-like constancy in brief, the more forceful and massive phenomena of the moral world,— we shall perceive the truth of the statement that sublimity is only another word for the effect of greatness-greatness of matter, space, power, virtue, beauty. Which of them does not enter into Emerson's picturesque-sublime conception of the Procession of