doubtless, his
virtue could not be explained by any reason drawn from the physical
order; the idea of nature--which always necessarily supposes that actual
phenomena rest upon some anterior phenomenon, as effects upon cause--this
idea no longer suffices to enable us to comprehend this man; because
there is nothing more contradictory than to admit that effect can remain
the same when the cause has changed to its contrary. We must then give
up all natural explanation or thought of finding the reason of his acts
in his condition; we must of necessity go beyond the physical order, and
seek the principle of his conduct in quite another world, to which the
reason can indeed raise itself with its ideas, but which the
understanding cannot grasp by its conceptions. It is this revelation of
the absolute moral power which is subjected to no condition of nature, it
is this which gives to the melancholy feeling that seizes our heart at
the sight of such a man that peculiar, inexpressible charm, which no
delight of the senses, however refined, could arouse in us to the same
extent as the sublime.

Thus the sublime opens to us a road to overstep the limits of the world
of sense, in which the feeling of the beautiful would forever imprison
us. It is not little by little (for between absolute dependence and
absolute liberty there is no possible transition), it is suddenly and by
a shock that the sublime wrenches our spiritual and independent nature
away from the net which feeling has spun round us, and which enchains the
soul the more tightly because of its subtle texture. Whatever may be the
extent to which feeling has gained a mastery over men by the latent
influence of a softening taste, when even it should have succeeded in
penetrating into the most secret recesses of moral jurisdiction under the
deceptive envelope of spiritual beauty, and there poisoning the holiness
of principle at its source--one single sublime emotion often suffices to
break all this tissue of imposture, at one blow to give freedom to the
fettered elasticity of spiritual nature, to reveal its true destination,
and to oblige it to conceive, for one instant at least, the feeling of
its liberty. Beauty, under the shape of the divine Calypso, bewitched
the virtuous son of Ulysses, and the power of her charms held him long a
prisoner in her island. For long he believed he was obeying an immortal
divinity, whilst he was only the slave of sense; but suddenly an
impress