and sin, and waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength
and the high places of pleasure;--these, partly degrading us by the
instinctive and paralyzing terror with which they are attended, and
partly ennobling us by leading our thoughts to dwell in the eternal
world, fill the last and the most important circle in that great kingdom
of dark and distorted power, of which we all must be in some sort the
subjects until mortality shall be swallowed up of life; until the waters
of the last fordless river cease to roll their untransparent volume
between us and the light of heaven, and neither death stand between us
and our brethren, nor symbols between us and our God.

Sec. LXVII. We have now, I believe, obtained a view approaching to
completeness of the various branches of human feeling which are
concerned in the developement of this peculiar form of art. It remains
for us only to note, as briefly as possible, what facts in the actual
history of the grotesque bear upon our immediate subject.

From what we have seen to be its nature, we must, I think, be led to one
most important conclusion; that wherever the human mind is healthy and
vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no
less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened
preeminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will
exist in full energy. And, accordingly, I believe that there is no test
of greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the
developement, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test
of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more
sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of
understanding it. I think that the central man of all the world, as
representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual
faculties, all at their highest, is Dante; and in him the grotesque
reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble developement to
which it was ever brought in the human mind. The two other greatest men
whom Italy has produced, Michael Angelo and Tintoret, show the same
element in no less original strength, but oppressed in the one by his
science, and in both by the spirit of the age in which they lived;
never, however, absent even in Michael Angelo, but stealing forth
continually in a strange and spectral way, lurking in folds of raiment
and knots of wild hair, and mountainous confusions of craggy limb and
clo