obvious truism placed in opposition to an absurd impossibility.  We needed not to be told, that no pleasurable emotion is likely to occur while we are unmanned by fear.  The same might be said, also, in respect to the Beautiful:  for who was ever alive to it under a paroxysm of terror, or pain of any kind?  A terrified person is in any thing but a fit state for such emotion.  He may indeed afterwards, when his fear is passed off, contemplate the circumstance that occasioned it with a different feeling; but the object of his dismay is then projected, as it were, completely from himself; and he feels the sublimity in a contemplative state:  he can feel it in no other.  Nor is that state incompatible with a consciousness of peril, though it can never be with personal terror.  And, if it is meant that we should have a positive, present conviction that we are in no danger, this we must deny, as we find it contradicted in innumerable instances.  So far, indeed, is a sense of security from being essential to the condition of a sublime emotion, that the sense of danger, on the contrary, is one of its most exciting accompaniments.  There is a fascination in danger which some persons neither can nor would resist; which seems, as it were, to disenthral them of self;—­as if the mysterious Infinite were actually drawing them on by an invisible power.

Was it mere scientific curiosity that cost the elder Pliny his life?  Might it not have been rather this sublime fascination?  But we have repeated examples of it in our own time.  Many who will read this may have been in a storm at sea.  Did they never feel its sublimity while they knew their danger?  We will answer for ourselves; for we have been in one, when the dismasted vessels that surrounded us permitted no mistake as to our peril; it was strongly felt, but still stronger was the sublime emotion in the awful scene.  The crater of Vesuvius is even now, perhaps for the thousandth time, reflecting from its lake of fire some ghastly face, with indrawn breath and hair bristling, bent, as by fate, over its sulphurous brink.

Let us turn to Mont Blanc, that mighty pyramid of ice, in whose shadow might repose all the tombs of the Pharaohs.  It rises before the traveller like the accumulating mausoleum of Europe:  perhaps he looks upon it as his own before his natural time; yet he cannot away from it.  A terrible charm hurries him over frightful chasms, whose blue depths seem like those of the ocean; he cuts his way up a polished precipice, shining like steel,—­as elusive to the touch; he creeps slowly and warily around and beneath huge cliffs of snow; now he looks up, and sees their brows fretted by the percolating waters like a Gothic ceiling, and he fears even to whisper, lest an audible breath should awaken the avalanche:  and thus he climbs and climbs, till the dizzy summit fills up his measure of fearful ecstasy.