Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Thy beauty walks, Thy tenderness and love
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;
Echo the mountains round: the forest smiles;
And every sense and every heart is joy.
Then comes Thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then Thy sun
Shoots full perfection through the swelling year:
And oft Thy voice in dreadful thunder speaks:
And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve,
By brooks and groves, in hollow whispering gales
Thy bounty shines in Autumn unconfined,
And spreads a common feast for all that lives.
In Winter awful! Thou with clouds and storms
Around Thee thrown, tempest o'er tempest rolled
Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind's wing,
Riding sublime, Thou bidst the world adore,

And humblest Nature with Thy northern blast."

And so on, through the whole piece, the same majesty of conception, ministering to the same dominant emotion-the sublime idea of an every-where-present God-dignifying the harmonious pictures of his creation, till the culmination in that incomparable close:

"Should fate command me to the furthest verge
Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,
Rivers unknown to song; where first the sun
Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beam
Flames on the Atlantic isles; 'tis nought to me:
Since God is ever present, ever felt,

In the void waste as in the city full;
And where He vital breathes there must be joy.
When e'en, at last, the solemn hour shall come,
And wing my mystic flight to future worlds,
I, cheerful, will obey; there, with new powers,

Will rising wonders sing: I cannot go
Where universal love not smiles around,
Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns;
From seeming evil still educing good,

And better thence again, and better still,

In infinite progression. But I lose

Myself in Him, in light ineffable!

Come then, expressive silence muse His praise."

I might adduce, also, Coleridge's "Hymn to Mont Blanc," which, with a grasp of stronger power, produces a similar effect in the same way.

On the other hand, literature, as well as the other arts, presents many examples of noble conceptions marred by circumstances inconsistent with ultimate beauty as well as with greatness. The ugly may appear in a sublime picture only as a discord in music, when correctly dissolved into the surrounding harmony. Such, for instance, is the homely image of the wedge, in the following from the "Hymn to Mont Blanc: "

"Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star
In his steep course? So long he seems to pause
On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc !
The Arve and Arveiron at thy base
Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form,
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines-
How silently. Around thee and above,
Deep is the air and dark, substantial black,
An ebon mass, methinks thou piercest it

As with a wedge! But when I look again,

It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!"

If not so esolved, the fate of the passage will be Witness the following from the Course

very different. of Time:

"Revealed in flaming fire,

The angel of God appeared in stature vast,
Blazing, and lifting up his hand on high,
By Him that lives forever, swore that time
Should be no more. Throughout, creation heard
And sighed; all rivers, lakes, and seas and woods,
Desponding waste and cultivated vales,
Wild cave and ancient hill, and every rock
Sighed. Earth, arrested in her wonted path,
As ox struck by the lifted ax when nought
Was feared, in all her entrails deeply groaned.
A universal crash was heard, as if

The ribs of Nature broke, and all her dark
Foundations failed."

The subject and principal imagery in this picture are essentially grand, and if treated in a proper, workmanlike manner, could not fail of sublimity; yet that effect is first marred by an enumeration of small items, and the conclusion is so incongruous that if the design were not otherwise known, the whole might be taken for a very happy attempt at burlesque. The earth suddenly arrested in her path by the will of an unseen God, and the universal sinking of Nature, are truly sublime—but the comparison of the Divine Will, in that act, to a butcher felling an ox, is so utterly at variance with the elements of both sublimity and beauty, that its introduction by a man of ordinary taste is unaccountable; and the catastrophe of Nature

breaking her ribs is not much better, being evidently borrowed from an accident to the human frame, which may be terrible, but is very far from sublime.

A fault of an apparently opposite nature, though really sinning against the same law, is that of decking common-place subjects in style and imagery of disproportionate grandeur, which tends only to turn the whole into ridicule. Pomposity of diction, so far from elevating a mean topic, is even injurious to the naturally lofty. The incongruity between swelling language and a common-place subject, or between petty affectation and a noble subject, is calculated to move only laughter and contempt.

In these remarks I would not be understood to mean that sublimity ever changes into beauty. Such a view is at variance with all my conceptions of the human mind. But the recognition of an object as one calculated to produce the former emotion is followed by the latter, unless marred by some unnecessary addition. Terror may overpower it, disgust may counteract it, astonishment may, for a season, paralyze the powers of reflection-but whenever the vast or the infinite is contemplated in itself, and in view of the emotion it primarily awakens, the resultant feeling is that admiration in which the human spirit loves to dwell.

CHAPTER VIII.

ASSOCIATION AND COMBINATION OF FEELINGS.

I HAVE presented the foregoing not as constituting a complete list of the states of mind addressed by art, but only as examples to show what I believe to be the true method of obtaining correct rules to work by, as well as just principles on which to judge, in all cases where matters of taste are in question. The feelings involved may be represented as infinitely varied, and those of which I have spoken as if isolated, are not isolated in their actual occurrence, but exist in multifarious combinations, shading into one another in such a manner that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins. They are of every conceivable degree, and the names applied to them are only signs for the more remarkable of a series-the larger waves that agitate the sea of thought, not regions of a boundary so definite that we can distinguish the very instant when the line has been crossed that separates joy from gladness, grief from sorrow, or veneration from esteem. They melt into one another insensibly, sometimes by a

« AnteriorContinuar »