the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the
track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the
author has made his own discoveries, if he should be so happy as to have
made any that are valuable.

THE SUBLIME.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,
that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about
terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a
source of the SUBLIME; that is, it is productive of the strongest
emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.


OBSCURITY.

Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and
principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be
from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of
religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the
barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in
a dark part of the hut which is consecrated to his worship. For this
purpose too the Druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of
the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading
oaks. No person seems better to have understood the secret of
heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression,
in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity, than
Milton.