ion of the sublime in the form of Mentor seizes him; he remembers
that he is called to a higher destiny--he throws himself into the waves,
and is free.

The sublime, like the beautiful, is spread profusely throughout nature,
and the faculty to feel both one and the other has been given to all men;
but the germ does not develop equally; it is necessary that art should
lend its aid. The aim of nature supposes already that we ought
spontaneously to advance towards the beautiful, although we still avoid
the sublime: for the beautiful is like the nurse of our childhood, and it
is for her to refine our soul in withdrawing it from the rude state of
nature. But though she is our first affection, and our faculty of
feeling is first developed for her, nature has so provided, nevertheless,
that this faculty ripens slowly and awaits its full development until the
understanding and the heart are formed. If taste attains its full
maturity before truth and morality have been established in our heart by
a better road than that which taste would take, the sensuous world would
remain the limit of our aspirations. We should not know, either in our
ideas or in our feelings, how to pass beyond the world of sense, and all
that imagination failed to represent would be without reality to us. But
happily it enters into the plan of nature, that taste, although it first
comes into bloom, is the last to ripen of all the faculties of the mind.
During this interval, man has time to store up in his mind a provision of
ideas, a treasure of principles in his heart, and then to develop
especially, in drawing from reason, his feeling for the great and the
sublime.

As long as man was only the slave of physical necessity, while he had
found no issue to escape from the narrow circle of his appetites, and
while he as yet felt none of that superior liberty which connects him
with the angels, nature, so far as she is incomprehensible, could not
fail to impress him with the insufficiency of his imagination, and again,
as far as she is a destructive force, to recall his physical
powerlessness. He is forced then to pass timidly towards one, and to
turn away with affright from the other. But scarcely has free
contemplation assured him against the blind oppression of the forces of
nature--scarcely has he recognized amidst the tide of phenomena something
permanent in his own being--than at once the coarse agglomeration of
nature that surrounds him begins to speak