Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos." Of the contemplative sublime, Pascal's Thoughts present some majestic instances, such as in those chapters on the nature and position of man, placed between the two abysses of infinity and nothingness, whose very consciousness of misery is a proof of his greatness, of whom he says: "L'homme n'est qu'un roseau le plus foible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'universe entier s'arme pour l'ecraser: une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le teur. Mais quand l'universe l'ecraseroit, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue ; parce qu'il sçait qu'il meurt; et l'avantage que l'universe a sur lui, l'universe n'en sçait rien. Ainsi toute notre dignite consiste dans la pensée. C'est de la qu'il faut nous relever-non de l'espace et de la durée." His estimate of the three orders of spirits, of power, genius, and goodness, in the chapter on Christ, is impregnate with his reflective grandeur. "Les grands génies ont leur empire, leur éclat, leur victories, et n'ont nul besoin des grandeurs charnelles, qui n'ont nul rapport avec celle qu'ils cherchent. Ils sont veus des esprits, non des yeux-mais c'est assez," etc. The following passage from Tillotson's Twelfth Sermon is noticeable for the moral grandeur of its ideas, and as an instance of the figure of amplification, where each thought rises above the other to a climax: ""Tis pleasant to be virtuous and good, because that is to excel many others. "Tis pleasant to grow better and better, because that is to excel ourselves. Nay, 'tis pleasant even to mortify and subdue our lusts, because that is victory; and to command our appetites and passions, holding them within due order, and within the bounds of reason and religion -for that is empire." As Milton's "Paradise Lost" is the finest exemplification of the union of the picturesque and dramatic sublime, let us select therefrom a few instances of the power of this imaginative passion. The description of hell in the first book is the most transcendent instance of the picturesque sublime in poetry. In this dungeon of limitless fire, whose flames shed no light, but rather a darkness visible, that serves but to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, where peace can never dwell, hope never comes-the first view of Satan, hugely stretched on the flood, confounded, but immortal, raising his head above the main "with eyes that sparkling blazed," and his resurrection from the ocean of fire, is a powerful imaginative vision: "Forthwith, upright he rears from off the pool His mighty stature; on each hand the flames, Driven.backward, slope their pointing spires, and rolled In billows, leave in the midst a horrid vale." Etherial temper, massy, large, and round, Hung on his shoulders, like the moon, whose orb, Through optic glass, the Tuscan artist views The following passage, in which the standard of hell is raised, is a fine instance of the united magnificence of picture and sound: "That proud honor claimed Who forthwith from the glittering staff unAzazel at his right, a cherub tall; furled Th' imperial ensign; which, full high advanced, Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind, All Milton's images are remarkable for imaginative combinations, and, when chosen materially to illustrate a material object, they are so managed as to expand our conception of it by some spiritual relation or inference. Such is that in which the ruined archangel, in whom "the excess of glory obscured" is compared to the sun new risen, that` "Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds The description of Satan's exploring flight around the frontiers and up the firmament of hell, where his form is com pared to a fleet descried far off at sea, hanging in the clouds-of Death (the sublime of obscurity and terror)—of his combat with Satan-of the course of the latter through Chaos-of its throne and vast unsubstantial ministers-Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name of Demigorgon are wonderful conceptions. As instances of the imagination for the picturesque sublime, the following passages, the first chiefly, have no parallel in any literature. Satan, surprised in the Garden of Eden, is preparing to battle with the angel sentinels: "Th' angelic squadron bright Turned fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns To hem him round. On the other side, Satan, alarmed, Collecting all his might, dilated stood, Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved; His stature reached the sky, and on his crest Sat Horror plumed; nor wanted in his grasp What seemed both spear and shield." And again, in the battle in heaven, when Satan is struck down by the sword of Abdiel: "Ten paces huge He back recoil'd; the tenth on bended knee, His massy spear upstay'd; as if on earth Winds under ground, or waters forcing way, Sidelong had pushed a mountain from its seat, Half sunk with all its pines." It would be easy to illustrate by comparison the vast superiority of Milton's imagination for the picturesque-sublime to all poets, Dante included, whose spirit seems to have influenced Keats, when he drew the following image of the overthrown giants, in his "Hyperion :" "Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways, like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve In dull November, and their chancel vault, The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night." Keat's genius, when he composed Hyperion," was still influenced by his predominating and supernatural sensuousness, as a glance at the lines previous to the above will show. He is speaking of the giants: "Without a motion, save of their big hearts Heaving with pain, and horribly convulsed With sanguine, feverous, boiling gurge of pulse," etc. he was ascending the Alp of imaginative Unhappily this bright genius died just as power, on whose summit that of Milton reigns supreme. Addison defines grandeur of manner, judicious selection of capital objects; but the last instances from Milton, above given, could never have resulted from the prevision of the understanding. They were, like all his mighty pictures, worked out in the visionary trance of the soul, in which, the power of the imagination predominating over, unconsciously eclecticised the judgments of the understanding. Vernon's description of Prince Harry, in Shakspeare's" Henry IV.:" "All furnished-all in armsAll plumed like estridges that wing the wind," etc., is an instance of grandeur of manner, as distinguished from the sublime. The dramatic sublime depends on conceptions of scene and character, under the influence of the highest degree of passion. What may be called the material, as opposed to the spiritual sublime, is found in several descriptions of tremendous events-of Moscow; Schiller's burning forest in such as Barbiere's picture of the burning the 66 Robbers," etc. The power of producing sublime effects of pathetic passion is, perhaps, the highest and rarest gift of nature and imagination combined. transcendent conceptions of this description Shakspeare surpasses all poets. The finest touches in Racine appear commonplace before many of those in "Lear," but especially that sudden, agonized appeal made by the forsaken, aged king to the heavens: In "Oh, Heavens ! If you do love old men, if your sweet sway As an illustration of the profoundest pathos, the sudden retrospective thought of Macduff, in the scene where he learns that Macbeth has murdered his wife and children, is unrivaled "Macduff. My children, too? Rosse. Wife, children, servants-all that could be found. Macduff. And I must be from thence ! Rosse. Macduff. I have said. Be comforted. BURKE defines beauty (he confines himself chiefly to its physical aspect) as consisting of the quality or qualities of bodies which cause love, or some passion similar to it, and adds that perfection is not its cause an idea which Apelles, when painting his Venus, did not entertain. Love is, indeed, the source of the sense of Let us make medicines of our beauty, whether physical or psychical, of great revenge, To cure this deadly grief. He has no children !" which there are many varieties; but As a burst of passion-of sublime grief inflamed into rage that which Shak-human face is the most beautiful which speare makes old Northumberland utter, unites the greatest number of harmonious when he hears of his son Percy's death, perfections of form, color, and expression, appears to us unapproached by any of the while the sense or emotion of beauty in superior poets, epic or dramatic: the objects of external nature springs from the sympathy their qualities, dispositions, and relations create, and the harmonies they produce on the imagination. In some cases, according to the nature of the object, love is the result-in all, delight. The sense of beauty, whatever be the object by which it is created -a human face or form, a landscape, a sunset, a strain of music, a thought or sentiment is the sense of the divine. "Now bind my brows with iron, and approach The ruggedest hour that time and fate can bring To frown upon enraged Northumberland. Keep the wide floods confin'd; let order die! On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, And darkness be the burier of the dead!" Instances of the sublime in character abound in Milton's portraiture and dialogues of the rebel angels, and in Eschylus' Prometheus." Among images which produce a similar effect, one of those mentioned by Longinus, as occurring in one of the lost dramas of the great Greek tragedian, deserves allusion-that of the ghost of Achilles, who is seen, a gigantic shadow, mournful and grand as heroic death, resting on his tomb, silently surveying the Greeks departing for the scene of their ten years' warfare, in which they had lost their bravest chiefs. The sublime partakes of the sentiment of infinity, cognate with the broad if somewhat vague vision of the highest imagination, as As no poet possessed so wonderful an imagination for character as Shakspeare, his conceptions of ideal beauty in character are the most perfect in literature; and it is from love their beauty is derived. Thus, Miranda in the "Tempest," Helena in " All's Well that End's Well," Perdita in "Winter's Tale," and Juliet, charm by the simple beauty of their natures; and while Cornelia in "Lear," and Rosalind in "As You Like It," illustrate beauty in connection with sorrow and joy, Imogen and Ophelia, similar in type, are rendered still higher examples of this element, from the deeper interest attaching to the development of their characters and their destinies in their respective dramas. The Beatrice of Dante-angelic womanhoodthough an exquisite conception of beauty in its ideal, in some of the scenes in which she appears has been frequently rendered toral of Longus,) to the "Consuello," and some other sketches of Sand, and to the "Columba" of De Musset, as illustrations. As instances of ideal beauty, the few attempts of the French stage poets are more dramatic than natural; and when Hugo conceives a character of this order, somewhat outré by being made the exponent of the poet's theological views-at one time breathing the divinest love, at another talking like Thomas Aquinas. Dante's conception of beauty, however, is finer and more spiritual than that of Milton, and where it deals with character, as natural as Shakspeare. The latter, foras Esmeralda-his ungovernable imaginstance, could not have surpassed the simple natural beauty of Francesca's account of the origin and progress of her love for Paolo (Inferno, cant. 5) : "Amor ch' al cor gentil ratto s' apprende Majesty was the attribute of Milton's genius; to this his sense of beauty was subsidiary. How inferior, for example, is his Paradise, arranged in the luxuriant order of an Italian garden, to his Pandemonium, as instances of the picturesque, beautiful, and sublime. How much more imaginatively, judging from his poetry, would Keats, had his genius matured, have painted that land of the dawn, that Orient region of light and love, where earth and heaven commingled! Even Milton's Eve, drawn with the noble chastity of poetic imagination and reason, would have been more attractive, as a work of beauty in character, had the poet made nature predominant in the conception-idealized in Shakspeare's way. The Paradise and Eve of Milton, however, though inferior, as we have said, to his grander pictures, are superior in the noble unity of their treatment to those of any other epic poet. Tasso is the nearest parallel, but his gardens of Armida and his enchantress are, from the nature of the subject, less poetically noble and interesting. Without alluding to the several instances of beauty connected with character, which may be found scattered through the dissolving scenes worked out by rich pagan genius, displayed in the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid, to some of those conserved in Percy's collection of English, in the Spanish, and other national ballads, and to the "Una" of Spenser, we may, glancing over the literature of France, point to St. Pierre's "Virginia," (which, however, is derived from the pas ination for impossible combinations and strong contrasts always hurries him into extravagance. In this brief reference to the element of beauty embodied in character, we may also mention the Margaret and Mignon of Goethe, and the Little Nell of Dickens. Poetic conceptions of idealized nature, such as those, are among the rarest achievements of the imagination. As Keats excelled all poets since Shakspeare in the natural sense of beauty, in the sensitive imagination, which was the chief characteristic of that divine genius, which vanished like a meteor just as it was ascending into the domain of power and art, we will extract a few passages from his poems, chiefly as instances of sensuous and picturesque beauty in description, premising that his gift of spontaneous imaginative language was supreme. First, with respect to pure sensuousness: "Here is wine Alive with sparkles-never, I aver, Sweeter than that nurse Amalthæa skimmed Exquisite is the picturesque beauty of the following stanza from the same poem, both in object and painting: "How sweetly did they float upon the wings "A casement high and triple-arched it was, grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, And in the mid'st, 'mong thousand her- And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings." Burke notes the sublimity of the lines which Virgil describes the components of the thunder as formed by Vulcan: "Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ, Addiderunt, rutili tres ignis et altis austri Fulgores nunc terrificos sonitumque, metumque Miscebant operi, flamisque sequacibus iras." This passage, the sublime of abstract combination, is equaled, if not surpassed, The conception and painting of objec-seen in Tasso's description of the cestus of by the abstract combination of beauty, as tive beauty is here perfect. The follow- Armida. The idea is derived from Homer: ing verse, however, descriptive of sleep falling on Madeline, with its image, is of a higher order of poetic beauty: Tenri sdegni, e placide e tranquile Ed al foco tempro di lente faci," etc. Tennyson's sense of beauty, perhaps, not originally so intense as that of Keats, has reached the highest perfection through culture. Beauty is the characteristic of his genius, and the numerous passages in his works infused with its spirit are perfect in form, color, tone, and harmony. As an instance of picturesque beauty, arising from the association between a scene and a state of mind, take the lines in which the Lotus Eaters describe their feelings in the lovely evening land of oblivion: "How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream With half-shut eyes, ever to seem To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Or from the "Princess," the following beautifully imaginative image: "Breathe upon my brows: Tennyson excels most poets in his pow er of painting female beauty-as in |