Spelunca alta fuit, vastoque immanis hiatu Scrupea, tuta lacu nigro, nemorumque tenebris; Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantes Tendere iter pennis:  talis sese halitus atris Faucibus effundens supera ad convexa ferebat.

I have added these examples, because some friends, for whose judgment I have great deference, were of opinion that if the sentiment stood nakedly by itself, it would be subject, at first view, to burlesque and ridicule; but this I imagine would principally arise from considering the bitterness and stench in company with mean and contemptible ideas, with which it must be owned they are often united; such an union degrades the sublime in all other instances as well as in those.  But it is one of the tests by which the sublimity of an image is to be tried, not whether it becomes mean when associated with mean ideas; but whether, when united with images of an allowed grandeur, the whole composition is supported with dignity.  Things which are terrible are always great; but when things possess disagreeable qualities, or such as have indeed some degree of danger, but of a danger easily overcome, they are merely odious; as toads and spiders.

SECTION XXII.

FEELING.—­PAIN.

Of feeling little more can be said than that the idea of bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labor, pain, anguish, torment, is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it.  I need not give here any fresh instances, as those given in the former sections abundantly illustrate a remark that, in reality, wants only an attention to nature, to be made by everybody.

Having thus run through the causes of the sublime with reference to all the senses, my first observation (Sect. 7) will be found very nearly true; that the sublime is an idea belonging to self-preservation; that it is, therefore, one of the most affecting we have; that its strongest emotion is an emotion of distress; and that no pleasure[23] from a positive cause belongs to it.  Numberless examples, besides those mentioned, might be brought in support of these truths, and many perhaps useful consequences drawn from them—­

    Sed fugit interea, fugit irrevocabile tempus,
    Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.

FOOTNOTES: 

[11] Part I. sect. 3, 4, 7.

[12] Part IV. sect. 3, 4, 5, 6.

[13] Part IV. sect. 14, 15, 16.

[14] Part V.

[15] Part I. sect. 7.

[16] Vide Part III. sect. 21.

[17] Part IV. sect. 9.

[18] Part IV. sect. 11.

[19] Part IV. sect. 13.

[20] Mr. Addison, in the Spectators concerning the pleasures of the imagination, thinks it is because in the rotund at one glance you see half the building.  This I do not imagine to be the real cause.