Works Author:John Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HOMER AND HIS TRANSLATORS. CRITIQUE IV. ACHILLES. [DECEMBER i83i.] It is to little purpose, we think, to attempt to enter into critical disquisitions on... more » what does or does not fall under the description of beauty or, of sublimity. Nor is it, in our opinion, of much avail, to go far into metaphysical enumeration of the different elements of which they may be constituted. We should say, generally, that all the powers of our nature to which delight is annexed, are capable of a beauty of their own. Nor does more appear to be required to produce this perception, than the intimate blending of delight with the object presented; a blending so deep, that the object, when incapable of sense, shall appear to the mind invested with that power of emotion which the mind indeed brings forth from itself. In connection with the fact of this dependence of beauty on the capacity of delight in the soul, and on the power of the object to raise up such a sudden suffusion of that feeling as shall spread over itself, it may be observed, that our feeling to beauty is very variable ; and that a state of greatly excited and joyous sensibility is capable of shedding the appearance of beauty over objects and scenes, like the sudden lighting up of sunshine, which do not at other times so recommend themselves to the imagination. As delight is the source of beauty, so pain and fear, and power, which subdues pain and fear, are the sources of sublimity. There may be said, as possibly we may have somewhere else hinted, to be two classes of sublime objects; those which shake the soul and make it tremble in its strength, and those on the contemplation of which it feelsitself elated and full of power. Or rather, it may be said, that both these kinds of emotion belong to sublimity; for both may perhaps be...« less