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(But, when the powers descending swell'd the flight,
Then tumult rose, fierce rage, and pale affright.
Now through the trembling shores Minerva calls,
And now she thunders from the Grecian walls.
Mars, hov'ring o'er his Troy, his terror shrouds
In gloomy tempests, and a night of clouds;
Now through each Trojan heart he fury pours
With voice divine from Ilion's topmost towers ;
Above the Sire of gods his thunder rolls,
And peals on peals redoubled rend the poles.
Beneath, stern Neptune shakes the solid ground,
The forests wave, the mountains nod around;
Through all her summits tremble Ida's woods,
And from their sources boil her hundred floods :
Troy's turrets totter on the rocking plain,
And the toss'd navies beat the heaving main ;
Deep in the dismal region of the dead
The infernal monarch rear'd bis horrid head,
Leap't from his throne, lest Neptune's arm should lay
His dark dominions open to the day,

And pour in light on Pluto's drear abodes,
Abhor'd by men, and dreadful e'en to gods.
Such wars the immortals wage; such horrors rend
The world's vast concave, when the gods contend.

Conciseness and simplicity will ever be found essential to sublime writing. Simplicity is properly opposed to studied and profuse ornament; and conciseness to superfluous expression. It will easily appear, why a defect either in conciseness or simplicity is peculiarly hurtful to the sublime. The emotion, excited in the mind by some great or noble object, raises it considerably above its common pitch. A species of enthusiasm is produced, extremely pleasing, while it lasts; but the mind is tending

every moment to sink into its ordinary state. When an author has brought us, or is endeavouring to bring us into this state, if he multiply words unnecessarily; if he deck the sublime object on all sides with glittering ornaments; nay, if he throw in any one decoration which falls in the least below the principal image; that moment he changes the key; he relaxes the tension of the mind; the strength of the feeling is emasculated; the beautiful may remain; but the sublime is extinguished. Homer's description of the nod of Jupiter, as shaking the heavens, has been admired in all ages, as wonderfully sublime. Literally translated, it runs thus; "He spoke, and bending his sable brows, gave the awful nod; while he shook the celestial locks of his immortal head, all Olympus was shaken." Mr. Pope translates it thus;

He spoke; and awful bends his sable brows,
Shakes his ambrosial curls, and gives the nod ;
The stamp of fate, and sanction of a God;

High heaven with trembling the dread signal took,
And all Olympus to its centre shook.

The image is expanded, and attempted to be beautified; but in reality it is weakened. The third line, "The stamp of fate, and sanction of a God," is entirely expletive, and introduced only to fill up the rhyme; for it interrupts the des cription, and clogs the image. For the same reason Jupiter is represented, as shaking his locks, before he gives the nod; "Shakes his ambrosial urls, and gives the nod;" which is trifling and

insignificant ; whereas in the original the shaking of his hair is the consequence of his nod, and makes a happy picturesque circumstance in the description.

The boldness, freedom, and variety of our blank verse are infinitely more propitious than rhyme, to all kinds of sublime poetry. The fullest proof of this is afforded by Milton; an author, whose genius led him peculiarly to the sublime. The first and second books of Paradise Lost are continued examples of it. Take, for instance, the following noted description of satan, after his fall, appearing at the head of his infernal hosts.

-He, above the rest,

In shape and gesture proudly eminent,

Stood, like a tower; his form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd
Less, than Archangel ruin'd, and the excess,
Of glory obscur'd; as when the sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams; or, from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the uations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs. Darken'd so, yet shone
Above them all the Archangel,

Here various sources of the sublime are joined together; the principal object superlatively great; a high, superior nature, fallen indeed, but raising itself against distress; the grandeur of the principal object heightened by connecting it with so noble an idea, as that of the sun suffering an eclipse; this picture, shaded with all those images of change and trouble, of darkness and

terror, which coincide so exquisitely with the sublime emotion; and the whole expressed in a style and vesification easy, natural, and simple, but magnificent.

Beside simplicity and concisenes, strength is essentially necessary to sublime writing. Strength of description proceeds, in a great measure; from conciseness; but it implies something more, namely, a judicious choice of circumstances in the description; such as will exhibit the object in its full and most striking point of view. For, every object has several faces, by which it may be presented to us, according to the circumstances with which we surround it; and it will appear superlatively sublime, or not, in proportion as these circumstances are happily chosen, and of a sublime kind. In this, the great art of the writer consists; and indeed the principal difficulty of sublime description. If the description be too general, and divested of circumstances; the object is shown in a faint light, and makes a feeble impression, or no impression, on the reader. At the same time, if any trivial or improper circumstances be mingled, the whole is degraded.

The nature of that emotion, which is aimed at by sublime description, admits no mediocrity, and cannot subsist in a middle state; but must either highly transport us; or, if unsuccessful in the execution, leave us exceedingly disgusted. We attempt to rise with the writer; the imagination is awakened, and put upon the stretch; but it ought to be supported; and, if in the midst of its effort it be deserted unexpectedly, it falls

with a painful shock. When Milton, in his battle of the angels, describes them, as tearing up mountains, and throwing them at one another; there are in his description, as Mr. Addison has remarked, no circumstances, but what are truly sublime;

From their foundations loos'ning to and fro,
They pluck'd the seated hills with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods; and by the shaggy tops
Uplifting bore them with their hands.-

This idea of the giants throwing the mountains, which is in itself so grand, Claudian renders burlesque and ridiculous, by the single cir⚫umstance of one of his giants, with the mountain Ida upon his shoulders, and a river, which flowed from the mountain, running down the giant's back, as he held it up in that posture. Virgil, in his description of mount Etna, is guilty of a slight inaccuracy of this kind. After several magnificent images, the poet concludes with personifying the mountain under this figure,

Eructans viscera cum gemitu"

"belching up its bowels with a groan ;" which, by making the mountain resemble a sick or drunken person, degrades the majesty of the description. The debasing effect of this idea will appear in a stronger light, from observing what figure it makes in a poem of Sir Richard Blackmore; who, though an extravagant perversity of taste, selected it for the principal circumstance in