Thus we have traced power through its several gradations unto the highest of all, where our imagination is finally lost; and we find terror, quite throughout the progress, its inseparable companion, and growing along with it, as far as we can possibly trace them.  Now, as power is undoubtedly a capital source of the sublime, this will point out evidently from whence its energy is derived, and to what class of ideas we ought to unite it.

SECTION VI.

PRIVATION.

ALL general privations are great, because they are all terrible; vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence.  With what a fire of imagination, yet with what severity of judgment, has Virgil amassed all these circumstances, where he knows that all the images of a tremendous dignity ought to be united at the mouth of hell!  Where, before he unlocks the secrets of the great deep, he seems to be seized with a religious horror, and to retire astonished at the boldness of his own design: 

    Dii, quibus imperium est animarum, umbraeque silentes! 
    Et Chaos, et Phlegethon! loca nocte silentia late! 
    Sit mihi fas audita loqui! sit numine vestro
    Pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas! 
    Ibant obscuri, sola sub nocte, per umbram,
    Perque domos Ditis vacuas, et inania regus.

   “Ye subterraneous gods! whose awful sway
    The gliding ghosts, and silent shades obey: 
    O Chaos hoar! and Phlegethon profound! 
    Whose solemn empire stretches wide around;
    Give me, ye great, tremendous powers, to tell
    Of scenes and wonders in the depth of hell;
    Give me your mighty secrets to display
    From those black realms of darkness to the day.”

PITT.

   “Obscure they went through dreary shades that led
    Along the waste dominions of the dead.”

DRYDEN.

SECTION VII.

VASTNESS.

Greatness[17] of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime.  This is too evident, and the observation too common, to need any illustration; it is not so common to consider in what ways greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or quantity, has the most striking effect.  For, certainly, there are ways and modes wherein the same quantity of extension shall produce greater effects than it is found to do in others.  Extension is either in length, height, or depth.  Of these the length strikes least; a hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower a hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude.  I am apt to imagine, likewise, that height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than looking up at an object of equal height; but of