of this sort are not required in order to the bringing out of character. Few can manage them rightly. There is a truth in ugliness, if I may so express it, which, if overstepped in the least degree, produces only a feeling of disgust. In general, character, passion, "the endless inflections of thought and passion," in order permanently to interest, must repose on the ideally beautiful as their basis. This, as it seems to me, is the true representation of the relation in which these two elements stand to each other in art. Life, expression, soul, requires some movement, some shade of deviation from the equipoise of absolutely perfect beauty, but a deviation which would be inconceivable except as that perfect beauty is presupposed. Thus in the statue considered the most perfect work that has come down to us from antiquity, in the Apollo Belvidere, the lower lip curls with the slightest expression of scorn as the god lets fly his shaft, sees it reach its mark, and moves calmly on. To conclude the subject, it is evident that some mixture of the characteristic is requisite, even in the most ideal creations. It is needed to awaken and sustain all that human interest which grows out of the passions, humors, and even weaknesses of our nature. The ancients, who were so devoted to the beautiful in form and in character, still had to make many concessions to this demand. The moderns, who attach far more importance to the individual, and to the traits that distinguish one individual from another, and therefore take a pleasure even in the eccentric, within certain limits, introduce into all their artistic productions a much richer diversity of character than we find in any works of the ancients. In these times, when the fondness for excitement has become a passion, we require, not a diversity merely, corresponding with the truth of nature, but the strongest contrasts, human nature exhibited at its extremes, and such contrasts running through the whole tissue and fabric of a composition, as if it were the only thing which could be safely depended on to create and sustain an interest. One who has been accustomed only to productions of the modern mind is likely to feel chilled by the coldness, and dulled by the comparative monotony, of the best translations of the ancient classics. esteem our modern form of art an improvement on the older models; and, doubtless, it is so, in all those branches of art which were capable of improvement in this particular direction. We CHAPTER IX. THE SUBLIME. EVERY one is conscious, in his own feelings, of a remarkable difference in the effect produced on him by those objects which are called beautiful, and by another class, addressed to the same power of judgment, but which are called sublime. There is a peculiar feeling of complacency, of admiration mingled with a sort of awe, awakened by whatever presents itself to the senses or to the imagination under any such form of undefined vastness or grandeur as seems to stagger and confound all power of distinctly conceiving it. Thus the broad ocean, an interminable desert, the depth beyond depth of the starry heavens, the crash of thunder, the shout of a vast multitude of men, and the like, produce, when there is no immediate or urgent sense of fear, an effect on us which I know not how better to describe than by saying that it is at once pleasing and elevating. The awe is not such as to depress or humble, but rather to raise us. The sublimity which we attribute to the outward object is in some sort a reflection from our own minds. And it is to be remarked that the judgment in this case, where we |