In further illustration of our position, it may be well here to notice one mistaken source of the Sublime, which seems to have been sometimes resorted to, both in poems and pictures; namely, in the sympathy excited by excruciating bodily suffering.  Suppose a man on the rack to be placed before us,—­perhaps some miserable victim of the Inquisition; the cracking of his joints is made frightfully audible; his calamitous “Ah!” goes to our marrow; then the cruel precision of the mechanical familiar, as he lays bare to the sight his whole anatomy of horrors.  And suppose, too, the executioner compelled to his task,—­consequently an irresponsible agent, whom we cannot curse; and, finally, that these two objects compose the whole scene.  What could we feel but an agony even like that of the sufferer, the only difference being that one is physical, the other mental?  And this is all that mere sympathy has any power to effect; it has led us to its extreme point,—­our flesh creeps, and we turn away with almost bodily sickness.  But let another actor be added to the drama in the presiding Inquisitor, the cool methodizer of this process of torture; in an instant the scene is changed, and, strange to say, our feelings become less painful,—­nay, we feel a momentary interest,—­from an instant revulsion of our moral nature:  we are lost in wonder at the excess of human wickedness, and the hateful wonder, as if partaking of the infinite, now distends the faculties to their utmost tension; for who can set bounds to passion when it seizes the whole soul?  It is as the soul itself, without form or limit.  We may not think even of the after judgment; we become ourselves justice, and we award a hatred commensurate with the sin, so indefinite and monstrous that we stand aghast at our own judgment.

Why this extreme tension of the mind, when thus outwardly occasioned, should create in us an interest, we know not; but such is the fact, and we are not only content to endure it for a time, but even crave it, and give to the feeling the epithet sublime.

We do not deny that much bodily suffering may be admitted with effect as a subordinate agent, when, as in the example last added, it is made to serve as a necessary expositor of moral deformity.  Then, indeed, in the hands of a great artist, it becomes one of the most powerful auxiliaries to a sublime end.  All that we contend for is that sympathy alone is insufficient as a cause of sublimity.

There are yet other sources of the false sublime, (if we may so call it,) which are sometimes resorted to also by poets and painters; such as the horrible, the loathsome, the hideous, and the monstrous:  these form the impassable boundaries to the true Sublime.  Indeed, there appears to be in almost every emotion a certain point beyond which we cannot pass without recoiling,—­as if we instinctively shrunk from what is forbidden to our nature.