I am sensible that this idea has met with opposition, and is likely still to be rejected by several.  But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing.  A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.  There is a passage in the book of Job amazingly sublime, and this sublimity is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described:  In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.  Then a spirit passed before my face.  The hair of my flesh stood up.  It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes; there was silence; and I heard a voice,—­Shall mortal man be more just than God? We are first prepared with the utmost solemnity for the vision; we are first terrified, before we are let even into the obscure cause of our emotion:  but when this grand cause of terror makes its appearance, what is it?  Is it not wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting, could possibly represent it?  When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have, I think, almost always failed; insomuch that I have been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of hell, to determine whether the painter did not intend something ludicrous.  Several painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet of the temptations of St. Anthony were rather a sort of odd, wild grotesques, than any thing capable of producing a serious passion.  In all these subjects poetry is very happy.  Its apparitions, its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting; and though Virgil’s Fame and Homer’s Discord are obscure, they are magnificent figures.  These figures in painting would be clear enough, but I fear they might become ridiculous.

SECTION V.

POWER.

Besides those things which directly suggest the idea of danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power.  And this branch rises, as naturally as the other two branches, from terror, the common stock of everything that is sublime.  The idea of power, at first view, seems of the class of those indifferent ones, which may equally belong to pain or to pleasure.  But in reality, the affection arising from the idea of vast power is extremely remote from that neutral