To prevent misapprehension, we may here observe, that, though the parts be few, it does not necessarily follow that they should always consist of simple or single objects. This narrow inference has often led to the error of mistaking mere space for grandeur, especially with those who have wrought rather from theory than from the true possession of their subjects. Hence, by the mechanical arrangement of certain large and sweeping masses of light and shadow, we are sometimes surprised into a momentary expectation of a sublime impression, when a nearer approach gives us only the notion of a vast blank. And the error lies in the misconception of a mass. For a mass is not a _thing_, but the condition of _things_; into which, should the subject require it, a legion, a host, may be compressed, an army with banners,--yet so that they break not the unity of their Part, that technic form to which they are subordinate. The difference between a Part and a Mass is, that a Mass may include, _per se_, many Parts, yet, in relation to a Whole, is no more than a single component. Perhaps the same distinction may be more simply expressed, if we define it as only a larger division, including several _parts_, which may be said to be analogous to what is termed the detail of a _Part_. Look at the ocean in a storm,--at that single wave. How it grows before us, building up its waters as with conscious life, till its huge head overlooks the mast! A million of lines intersect its surface, a myriad of bubbles fleck it with light; yet its terrible unity remains unbroken. Not a bubble or a line gives a thought of minuteness; they flash and flit, ere the eye can count them, leaving only their aggregate, in the indefinite sense of multitudinous motion: take them away, and you take from the _mass_ the very sign of its power, that fearful impetus which makes it what it is,--a moving mountain of water. We have thus endeavoured, in the opposite characters of the Sublime and the Gay or Magnificent, to exhibit the two extremes of Variety; of the intermediate degrees it is unnecessary to speak, since in these two is included all that is applicable to the rest.