xa ferebat_.

I have added these examples, because some friends, for whose judgment I
have great deference, were of opinion that if the sentiment stood
nakedly by itself, it would be subject, at first view, to burlesque and
ridicule; but this I imagine would principally arise from considering
the bitterness and stench in company with mean and contemptible ideas,
with which it must be owned they are often united; such an union
degrades the sublime in all other instances as well as in those. But it
is one of the tests by which the sublimity of an image is to be tried,
not whether it becomes mean when associated with mean ideas; but
whether, when united with images of an allowed grandeur, the whole
composition is supported with dignity. Things which are terrible are
always great; but when things possess disagreeable qualities, or such
as have indeed some degree of danger, but of a danger easily overcome,
they are merely _odious_; as toads and spiders.

SECTION XXII.

FEELING.--PAIN.

Of _feeling_ little more can be said than that the idea of bodily pain,
in all the modes and degrees of labor, pain, anguish, torment, is
productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce
it. I need not give here any fresh instances, as those given in the
former sections abundantly illustrate a remark that, in reality, wants
only an attention to nature, to be made by everybody.

Having thus run through the causes of the sublime with reference to all
the senses, my first observation (Sect. 7) will be found very nearly
true; that the sublime is an idea belonging to self-preservation; that
it is, therefore, one of the most affecting we have; that its strongest
emotion is an emotion of distress; and that no pleasure[23] from a
positive cause belongs to it. Numberless examples, besides those
mentioned, might be brought in support of these truths, and many perhaps
useful consequences drawn from them--

Sed fugit interea, fugit irrevocabile tempus,
Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Part I. sect. 3, 4, 7.

[12] Part IV. sect. 3, 4, 5, 6.

[13] Part IV. sect. 14, 15, 16.

[14] Part V.

[15] Part I. sect. 7.

[16] Vide Part III. sect. 21.

[17] Part IV. sect. 9.

[18] Part IV. sect. 11.

[19] Part IV. sect. 13.

[20] Mr. Addison, in the Spectators concerning the pleasures of the
imagination, thinks it is because in the rotund at one glance you see
half the building. This I do