Those only who have passed through the degrees, _common sense, truth_ and _grace_, i.e. the sentiment of grace, can have a sentiment of sublimity. It is the mild admiration of grace raised to _wonder_ and _astonishment_; to a sentiment of _power_ out of _our power_ to produce or control. Grace must have been as familiar to the intellect, in order to discover sublimity, as common sense in the common region must have been to the discovery of truth and beauty. In fine, genius, or taste, which is the sentiment of grace, and which I have called the common sense of the ideal region, can alone discover the true sublime. It is a pinnacle of beatitude bordering upon horror, deformity, madness! an eminence from whence the mind, that dares to look farther, is lost! It seems to stand, or rather to waver, between certainty and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power! The idea of the supreme Being is, I imagine, in every breast, from the clown to the greatest philosopher, his point of sublimity! CHAPTER II. On the ORIGIN of our IDEAS of BEAUTY. In proportion as the principles of beauty exist in the common form, undetermined to the common eye, so do they exist in common sense, undetermined to the common mind. It is cultivation that calls them into view, gives them a determined form, creates the object, and the perception, that 'Truth and good are one, And beauty dwells in them, and they in her.' AKENSIDE. But, though all truth resolves into one truth, one beauty, one good, as all colours resolve into one light; though the scientifical intellectual colours, classes, or leading principles of science, the _physical_, the _moral_, the _metaphysical_, &c. &c. resolve into intellectual light, beauty, or good; it is, I imagine, the moral truth, that is the characteristic truth of beauty: for, were we to analyse the pleasing emotions we feel at the sight of beauty, we should, I imagine, find them composed of our most refined moral affections; and hence the universal interesting charm of beauty. And, as those affections refine by culture, hence the different degrees of the sentiments which beauty creates in the rustic, and in the man of taste. The former perceives only the physical charm of beauty, the freshness of colour, the bloom of youth, &c. but, to the man of taste, the physical pleases only through the medium of the moral: _the body charms because the soul is seen_; beauty, in his breast, is the source from whence _endless streams of fair ideas flow_, extending throughout the whole region of taste, no object of which but is more or less related to the principles of human beauty. But taste, though a subject almost inseparable from that of beauty, I must forbear to enlarge upon in this chapter, as I propose to make it the particular subject of my next.