the imagination. Take, for instance, but a single _passion_, and
clothe it with this character; in the same instant it becomes sublime.
So, too, with a single thought. In the Mosaic words so often quoted,
"Let there be light, and there was light," we have the sublime of
thought, of mere naked thought; but what could more awe the mind with
the power of God? Of like nature is the conjecture of Newton, when he
imagined stars so distant from the sun that their coeval light has not
yet reached us. Let us endeavour for one moment to conceive of this;
does not the soul seem to dilate within us, and the body to shrink
as to a grain of dust? "Woe is me! unclean, unclean!" said the holy
Prophet, when the Infinite Holiness stood before him. Could a more
terrible distance be measured, than by these fearful words, between
God and man?

If it be objected to this view, that many cases occur, having the same
conditions with those assumed in our general proposition, which are
yet exclusively painful, unmitigated even by a transient moment of
pleasure,--in Despair, for instance,--as who can limit it?--to this we
reply, that no emotion having its sole, or circle of existence in
the individual mind itself, can be to that mind other than a
_subject_. A man in despair, or under any mode of extreme
suffering of like nature, may, indeed, if all interfering sympathy
have been removed by time or after-description, be to _another_
a sublime object,--at least in one of those suggestive forms just
noticed; but not to _himself_. The source of the sublime--as all
along implied--is essentially _ab extra_. The human mind is not
its centre, nor can it be realized except by a contemplative act.

Besides, as a mental pleasure,--indeed the highest known,--to
be recognized as such, it must needs be accompanied by the same