so they stand awe-struck in the "wind of the going" of a majestic and
unseen Being. This feeling differs from mysticism, inasmuch as it is
connected with a reality, while the mystic dreams a vague and
unsupported dream, and the poetry it produces is simply the irresistible
cry springing from the perception of this wondrous Some One who is
actually near them. The feeling is connected, in general, with a lofty
moral and religious nature; and yet not always, since, while wanting in
Dryden, we find it intensely discovered, although in an imperfect and
perverted shape, in Byron and Rousseau.

In Dryden certainly it exists not. We do not--and in this we have
Jeffrey's opinion to back us--remember a single line in his poetry that
can be called sublime, or, which is the same thing, that gives us a
thrilling shudder, as if a god or a ghost were passing by. Pleasure,
high excitement,--rapture even, he often produces; but such a feeling as
is created by that line of Milton,

"To bellow through the vast and boundless deep,"

never. Compare, in proof of this, the description of the tournament in
"Palamon and Arcite"--amazingly spirited as it is--to the description of
the war-horse in Job; or, if that appear too high a test, to the
contest of Achilles with the rivers in Homer; to the war of the Angels,
and the interrupted preparations for contest between Gabriel and Satan
in Milton; to the contest between Apollyon and Christian in the
"Pilgrim's Progress;" to some of the combats in Spenser; and to that
wonderful one of the Princess and the Magician in midair in the "Arabian
Nights," in order to understand the distinction between the most
animated literal pictures of battle and those into which the element of
imagination is strongly injected by the poet, who can, to the inevitable