half celestial; for all the virtues accompany, indeed
compose, the perception; for none, I imagine, can have a perception of
grace that has none of the charms of virtue.

The sentiment of grace, caused by the motion of beauty, music, poetry,
beneficence, compassion, &c. may be ranked as the highest intellectual
pleasure the mind is capable of perceiving, and brings with it a sort
of undetermined consciousness of the delicacy of our own perceptions
in making the discovery, a degree of that glorying that Longinus
observes always accompanies the perception of the sublime.

You can no more define grace than you can happiness. The mind cannot
so stedfastly behold it as to investigate its real properties. Grace
is indeed the point of happiness in the ideal region, both because it
arises spontaneously, without effort, &c. and because it seems partly
_within_ our own power, and partly _without_ it.

As common sense, in my fundamental circle, seems diffusive truth, so
grace, in my ideal circle, seems diffusive sublimity; every perception
of the former seems to be tinged, as it were, with the colour of the
latter.

Section 4. _Sublimity_.

Where pure grace ends, the awe of the sublime begins, composed of the
influence of pain, of pleasure, of grace, and deformity, playing into
each other, that the mind is unable to determine which to call it,
pain, pleasure, or terror. Without a conjunction of these powers there
could be no sublimity.

Those only who have passed through the degrees, _common sense, truth_
and _grace_, i.e. the sentiment of grace, can have a sentiment of
sublimity. It is the mild admiration of grace raised to _wonder_
and _astonishment_; to a sentiment of _power_ out of _our power_ to
produce or control. Grace must have been as familiar to the intellect,
in order to discover sublimity, as common sense in the common region
must have been to the discovery of truth and beauty. In fine, genius,
or taste, which is the sentiment of grace, and which I have called the
common sense of the ideal region, can alone discover the true sublime.

It is a pinnacle of beatitude bordering upon horror, deformity,
madness! an eminence from whence the mind, that dares to look farther,
is lost! It seems to stand, or rather to waver, between certainty
and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of
terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power!

The idea of the supreme Being is, I imagine, in every b