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But what are cuts, bruises, fatigue, and singed eyelashes, in comparison with the awful sublimities I have witnessed to-day? The activity of Kilauea on Jan. 31 was as child's play to its activity to-day: as a display of fireworks compared to the conflagration of a metropolis.
How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest of substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities the sky, the rock, and the ocean the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to a corner therein. But all at once the approaching figure had disappeared.
The lives of daily crucifixion without hope of reward are abundant all about you you all know them. And if once you exploit these actual sublimities of human nature of the man in the street no tale of devotion in Holy Writ will ever again move you as these do.
You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they have even volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the English are so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
Friedrich Wilhelm, out of filial piety, wore at his father's funeral the grand French peruke and other sublimities of French costume; but it was for the last time: that sad duty once done, he flung the whole aside, not without impatience, and on no occasion wore such costume again. He was not a friend to French fashions, nor had ever been; far the contrary.
Though there were something save the past, and this The particles of those sublimities Which have relapsed to chaos: here repose Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his The starry Galileo, with his woes; Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it rose. These are four minds, which, like the elements, Might furnish forth creation: Italy!
In his rude hovel, with all the sublimities of Nature around him, this child of the wilderness looks up to the summits of the Atlas, "with peaky tops engrailed," and immediately thereafter looks down again to attend to the engrailing of his neat five-franc pieces, which can hardly be told from the genuine. This multiplication of finance was punished under the beys with death.
Lower and lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of landscape gradually usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry, the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater.
Those English critics who at the beginning of the present century introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction between Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity the laughter of the comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods of seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy in him, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are alike genuine and contagious.
If the central depths were untouched, hardly a pin-point of surface remained the same. And this was the very place to bring out the completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the perpetuities, might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a day's revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.
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