Whenever in mountains or cataracts we discover a likeness to any thing
artificial which yet we know is not artificial--what pleasure! And so
it is in appearances known to be artificial, which appear to be natural.
This applies in due degrees, regulated by steady good sense, from a
clump of trees to the Paradise Lost or Othello. It would be easy to
apply it to painting and even, though with greater abstraction of
thought, and by more subtle yet equally just analogies--to music. But
this belongs to others;--suffice it that one great principle is common
to all the fine arts,--a principle which probably is the condition of
all consciousness, without which we should feel and imagine only by
discontinuous moments, and be plants or brute animals instead of men;--I
mean that ever-varying balance, or balancing, of images, notions, or
feelings, conceived as in opposition to each other;--in short, the
perception of identity and contrariety; the least degree of which
constitutes likeness, the greatest absolute difference; but the infinite
gradations between these two form all the play and all the interest of
our intellectual and moral being, till it leads us to a feeling and an
object more awful than it seems to me compatible with even the present
subject to utter aloud, though I am most desirous to suggest it. For
there alone are all things at once different and the same; there alone,
as the principle of all things, does distinction exist unaided by
division; there are will and reason, succession of time and unmoving
eternity, infinite change and ineffable rest!--


Return Alpheus! the dread voice is past
Which shrunk thy streams!--Thou honour'd flood,
Smooth-'flowing' Avon, crown'd with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard, was of a higher mood!--
But now my 'voice' proceeds.