Of Milton, De Quincey says that he is not a poet among poets, but a power among powers; and that he alone exhibits the sublime not fitfully and at intervals, but in a sustained and unintermittent manner. The subject of Paradise Lost is of itself of this description. The characters are God, angels, devils, and new-made man. The scenes are heaven, hell, and paradise. The angelic beings are created by the poet's own invention; even their language has to be created, and the dialect which they speak has a grand cadence of the true Miltonic character. The first, second, and third books contain a sustained flight into the loftiest regions of imagination, where all is sublime, and where it is difficult to select any one example in preference to any other :

"Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms."

"The thunder,

Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless deep."

"To be no more: sad cure. For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost

66

In the wide womb of uncreated night,

Devoid of sense and motion ?"

"Black it stood as night,

Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,

And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head

The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”

Hail, holy light! offspring of heaven first-born,

Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam."

"Lowly reverent

Towards either throne they bow, and to the ground,

With solemn adoration, down they cast

Their crowns inwove with amarant and gold.

Immortal amarant, a flower which once

In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life,

Began to bloom; but soon for man's offence

To heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows
And flowers aloft shading the Tree of Life ;

And where the River of Bliss through midst of heaven
Rolls o'er Elysian flowers her amber stream,

With these, that never fade, the spirits elect

Bind their resplendent locks inwreathed with gems."

"Thee, Father, first they sung, Omnipotent,

Immutable, Immortal, Infinite,

Eternal King; the Author of all being;
Fountain of light, Thyself invisible

Amid the glorious brightness where Thou sittest,
Throned inaccessible; but when Thou shadest
The full blaze of Thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about Thee like a radiant shrine,
Dark with excessive bright Thy skirts appear."

Among other English poets examples abound. Gray, in the following, seems to have caught Milton's own inspiration:

"Nor second he that rode sublime
Upon the seraph wings of Ecstasy,
The secrets of the abyss to spy.

He passed the flaming bounds of space and time:

The living throne, the sapphire blaze,

Where angels tremble while they gaze,

He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night."

Byron affords more passages of this lofty and thrilling kind than any other poet since Milton. His impetuous and vehement spirit is always ready to rise to the level of the highest themes, and the vigor of his language never fails. His Thunder-storm on Jura, Battle of Waterloo, and Address to the Ocean may be cited as examples.

Wordsworth is too philosophical and contemplative to exhibit much of so fervid a quality; but, in spite of this, in his Ode on Immortality he has risen to a height of grandeur attainable but by few.

Campbell's vigorous muse frequently rises to the sublime, and perhaps attains its highest power in Hohenlinden.

Great sublimity of conception and expression is exhibited by Shelley in the first canto of the Revolt of Islam, and in the Prometheus Unbound. Mrs. Browning's Seraphim, and Drama of Exile, which are due to the influence of Shelley's poetry,

though often overwrought and strained, nevertheless rise to very lofty heights of thought.

The following lines exhibit the power of Keats to attain to the utmost grandeur of conception :

"Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene,

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez-when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent upon a peak in Darien."

§ 431. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL.
The difference between the sublime and the beautiful is seen
in Milton, and is described and illustrated in Tennyson's ode:
"O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,

Milton, a name to resound for ages;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armories,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean

Rings to the roar of an angel onset-
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,

And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even."

The sublime is intense, and therefore short-lived, and often but momentary. The beautiful is prolonged, and may be perpetual. As Shakespeare says in Antony and Cleopatra :

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety."

Or in the words of Keats's Endymion :

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness."

S

CHAPTER III.

THE RIDICULOUS.

8432. THE RIDICULOUS.

THE ridiculous has reference to those things which conduce to mirthfulness, laughter, or derision. The term "ludicrous" is often used as interchangeable with it.

There are some who distinguish between the two, associating the former with contempt, and the latter with mirthfulness; but this is a distinction which cannot be insisted on, and the term ridiculous may be considered as the more comprehensive of the two.

The source of the ridiculous lies in the perception of incongruity. The laws of mind and experience lead us to anticipate a regular order in ideas or in events, such as the logical sequence of cause and effect, antecedent and consequent; the proper classification of genus and species; the subordination of a part to the whole, the less to the greater, and the like. By incongruity is meant the violation of this order, and the effect of this is to excite within the mind a sense of the ludicrous. This is illustrated in the following cases.

1. Cause and effect. Where there is a great parade of preparation without any result whatever: as—

"The king of France, with twice ten thousand men,
Marched up the hill-and then marched down again."

2. Antecedent and consequent. Where there is an inconsequential statement, that is, where one statement follows another without any connection between them: as—

"To whom the knight, with comely grace,

Put off his hat, to put his case."

"His head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died."

GENERAL LIBRARY

The Ridiculous.

3. Classification. Where discordant things are jumbled to gether: as

"Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast,

When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last."

4. Comparison. Where the resemblance is affirmed between two totally incongruous objects, which, however, are said to have one thing in common: as

5. Contrast. presented:

Aside.

"Like a lobster boiled the morn,

From black to red began to turn."

Where an unexpected and violent contrast is

"I really take it very kind,

This visit, Mrs. Skinner.

I have not seen you such an age

(The wretch has come to dinner)."

The sense of the ridiculous is as widely diffused as the sense of the beautiful, and differs according to the taste in the same. way. The clown enjoys coarse jokes, while the man of culture can only appreciate refined wit, and is disgusted by that which is amusing to the other, while to the other the light and graceful raillery of the educated man seems unintelligible.

§ 433. WIT.

The chief elements of the ridiculous are two, namely, wit and humor.

1. Wit.

Wit is a certain quickness of fancy, by which ideas, seemingly incongruous, are associated in a pointed and amusing manner. It may also be defined as a sudden association of incongruous things, expressed in brief and striking language.

In wit there are three requisites:

Ist. Pointed expression, such as antithesis, which is often used; or any other form which may serve this purpose. 2d. Brevity. "Brevity is the soul of wit."

3d. The association of incongruities: as

"The general is a great taker of snuff as well as of towns."

"Beneath this stone my wife doth lie;

She's now at rest-and so am I."