CELESTIAL GRANDEURS.

Not for so short a moment could'st thou bear
Thy finger in the fire as that in which

I saw the sign next Taurus, and was there.

O glorious stars, O light supremely rich
In every virtue which I recognise

As source of all my powers,

Look down once more, and see the world how wide
Beneath thy feet it lieth, far outspread;

So that my heart, with joy beatified,

May join those hosts with triumph now elate,
That here in this ethereal sphere abide.

Then I retraced my way through small and great

Of those seven spheres, and then this globe did seem
Such that I smiled to see its low estate;

I saw the daughter of Latona there

All glowing bright, without that shadowy veil,
Which once I dreamed was caused by dense and rare;

I saw, with open glance that did not fail,

The glories, Hyperion, of thy son,

And Maia and Dione how they sail

Around and near him, and Jove's temperate zone

"Twixt sire and son, and then to me were clear
Their varying phases as they circle on.

Plumptre's Translation.

101

The subject is frequently taken up in short allusions, but has as yet scarcely received an adequate treatment according to the discoveries of Modern Astronomy, which, instead of curbing imagination, as science often does, proIvides it with new outlets.

The cosmogony of Milton is highly artificial; his management of the great sidereal expanse is combined with Satan's movements, and, only in touches, gives the sublime of vastness. (See Professor Masson's delineation of the Miltonic Cosmogony, in the Dissertations to Paradise Lost.) The following lines from Pope give a nearly pure example of the celestial Sublime :

He who through vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,

What other planets circle other suns,
What varied being peoples every star,

May tell why Heaven has made us as we are.

The want here is a comprehensive view to include the vast and varied contents of the starry depths. The passage indicates the points of interest that are usually drawn upon in such flights; the existence of human inhabitants in the remote systems, and the illustration of creative might.

Goethe touches the theme in the Prologue to Faust, but makes an abrupt transition to the earthly forces, which he depicts with strokes of grandeur. He feels the superior efficacy of movement, and selects his points accordingly :

Still quiring as in ancient time

With brother spheres in rival song,
The Sun with thunder-march sublime
Moves his predestined course along.

The Sublimity of Time is a more frequent subject of treatment both in poetry and in elevated prose. It does not demand the same stretch of language as the Space universe: although illimitable in two directions, it admits of being narrowed in the breadth of the stream. Another reason for its choice is illustrative of the view taken of neutral strength: it readily admits an appeal to our emotions in the form of pathos if not also destructive malignity. The first example is a prose extract from Chalmers:

"(1) One might figure a futurity that never ceases to flow, and which has no termination; but who can climb his ascending way among the obscurities of that infinite which is behind him? (2) Who can travel in thought along the track of generations gone by, till he has overtaken the eternity which lies in that direction? (3) Who can look across the millions of ages which have elapsed, and from an ulterior post of observation look again to another and another succession of centuries; and at each further extremity in this series of retrospects, stretch backward his regards on an antiquity as remote and indefinite as ever? (4) Could we, by any number of successive strides over these mighty intervals, at length reach the fountain-head of duration, our spirits might be at rest. (5) But to think of duration as having no fountainhead; to think of time with no beginning; to uplift the imagination along the heights of an antiquity which hath positively no summit; to soar these upward steeps till dizzied by the altitude we can keep no longer on the wing: for the mind to make these repeated flights from one pinnacle to another, and instead of scaling the mysterious elevation, to lie baffled at its foot, or lose itself among the far, the long withdrawing recesses of that primeval distance, which at length merges away into a fathomless unknown; this is an exercise utterly discomfiting to the puny faculties of man.

This fine passage works up the sublimity of duration, through great resources of language and figure, assisted by the skilful use of intermediate gradations leading to a climax. The special quality of strength appealed to is a vastness that simply overpowers us, and illustrates our insignificance and nothingness, without doing us any other harm. For the sake of being lifted to the conception of such immense power, we offer ourselves up as exemplary victims.

(1) The first sentence draws a questionable contrast between an

CHALMERS ON ETERNITY.

103

endless future and an infinite past; making it appear, without obvious justification, that the future is, in conception, the least arduous of the two. This contrast adds nothing to the effect of the passage; the power commences with the second member of the sentence-Who can climb his ascending way among the obscurities of that infinite which is behind him?' The author is naturally led to adopt the figure of Interrogation, and sustains it through the next two sentences.

(2) This sentence is merely varying the statement of the position, by help of the author's opulent vocabulary. 'Who can travel in thought along the track of generations gone by, till he has overtaken the eternity which lies in that direction?' The language here is cumbrous, notwithstanding its power. A little variation might be tried. 'Who can carry his thoughts along the innumerable generations gone by, and overtake the eternal commencement of them all?'

(3) Who can look across the millions of ages which have elapsed, and from an ulterior post of observation look again to another and another succession of centuries; and, at each further extremity in the series of retrospects, stretch backward his regards on an antiquity as remote and indefinite as ever?' The force of the language is fully sustained, and the operation of grading well carried out.

(4) Could we, by any number of successive strides over these mighty intervals, at length reach the fountain-head of duration, our spirits might be at rest.' The last clause is not the best that we could desire, but the form of the sentence, in summing up, as it were, the result of the previous one, is highly effective.

(5) Now comes the climax, which is grandly sustained. To reach the highest pitch of the language of strength, strong negatives are essential.

The author has done everything that could be required of him in his bold undertaking. He has provided a series of the most powerful strokes of language, each rising perceptibly above the one previous, until the strain could be carried no higher. The real climax is reached at 'fathomless unknown'. The concluding clause is a transition that might easily have been a bathos; but is saved by the intensity of the language.

It is noticeable that the author employs figures derived from space relations, much more than the proper vocabulary of duration.

Hardly any better instance can be given of the pure or neutral sublime. It shows how vast must be the scale of the quality to make an impression comparable to the sublimity of maleficent or beneficent strength.

Examples of the theme are frequent with the poets. The concluding lines of the Pleasures of Hope' need only be referred to. Its examination shows at a glance that other emotions besides duration in its vastness are appealed to.

The following is from Shelley :—

Yet pause, and plunge

Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,

Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight,

Till it sink dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless.

This might be taken as a poetical condensation of the passage from Chalmers.

Historical time, past and future, is thus pictured in 'Locksley Hall':

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed;

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see ;

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

This limitation to historical time makes a case of personal human interest; as is usual with more limited surveys of the past and the future.

The sublime of terrestrial amplitudes, masses and moving powers, with more or less of personifying aid, is abundant in poetry. It is one of the products of the growing sensibility to Nature that recent ages can boast of. See, for example, the pictures of Mont Blanc, by Coleridge, by Shelley, and by Byron, where the sublime of mass is as nearly pure as may be.

Still more efficacious is the momentum of masses in motion, as seen in rivers, floods, ocean waves and tides, volcanic outbursts, earthquakes, and the great appliances of human art. Thus :

Along these lonely regions, where retir'd

From little scenes of art, great Nature dwells

In awful solitude, and nought is seen

But the wild herds that own no master's stall,
Prodigious rivers roll their fattening seas.

Any further attempt to exemplify Neutral Strength in typical purity is needless; the tendency of manifested power to run into the channels of strongest personal emotion is sufficiently apparent. Accordingly, it is reserved for a more promiscuous selection of passages to illustrate the Sublime in all its multiplicity of aspects and constituents.

SHAKESPEARE'S STORM DESCRIPTIONS.

PROMISCUOUS PASSAGES.

105

Among the loftiest flights of Shakespeare's sublimity, we may place a well known passage in 'Lear'. It illustrates the poetry of destructive energy, and makes us feel how much this exceeds in effect the finest handling of either beneficent or neutral strength. It is the parallel to the Macbeth challenge to the witches, but still more densely compacted.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts, and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,

That make ingrateful man.

L. 1. The phrase 'crack your cheeks' is wanting in dignity, unless we suppose the speaker in a contemptuous and defiant mood. It has a redeeming point in the familiar figure of a cherub blowing hard with distended cheeks.

L. 2. The conjunction 'cataracts' and 'hurricanoes' is meant to prepare for the drenching in the next line; but hardly expresses it. The precedence should be given to hurricane,' whose foremost effect is wind, with the incidental accompaniment of furious rains, to which the cataract would then point.

L. 3. Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks,' is powerful, but extravagant.

L. 4-6. The lightning is embodied in the sulphurous and thought-executing fires'; neither epithet is specially applicable. 'Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts' is a grand conjunction of epithets for thunder; oak-cleaving' is more conceivable than thought-executing'. Singe my white head' is barely redeemed from feebleness by the intensity of the speaker's passion. L. 7 contains one of Shakespeare's grander strokes of condensed energy. He takes up the globe in a breath, and proposes to strike it flat; although the greatest exaggeration of the might of thunder is unequal to the attempt.

L. 8 repeats the unsurpassable figure in the Macbeth passage, the destruction of our race, and of all living beings, at one stroke. It would be the revocation of the earth to its inorganic state, prior to the supposed evolution of life.

The storm in 'Julius Cæsar' attains an equal, if not a greater, pitch of sublimity.

Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen