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world so, then, is certainly regarded as a revelation of God, and He Himself is the goodness-as concerns this created thing which in itself has no right to be or to refer itself to itself as on its own account to let it go nevertheless its own way, and to give it place; the stability and consistence of the finite, however, is substanceless, and, opposed to God, the creature is impotent and evanescent; so that with the goodness of God there is at the same time manifested His righteousness, which makes actually appear, in this creature that is virtually negative, its own powerlessness, and thereby His substance as the sole might. This relation, when it is made dominant by art as the ground-relation both in matter and form, supplies the artform of the sublime proper. Beauty of the ideal and sublimity must be clearly distinguished from each other. For in the ideal of beauty the inner penetrates and pervades the outer reality, of which it is the inner, in such wise, that both sides appear as adequate to each other, and even on this account as penetrating and pervading each other. In the subIn the sublime, again, the outer existence, in which substance is brought before the mind, is, as opposed to this substance, subordinated and set down; this very subordination and ancillariness being the only mode through which, by means of art, there can be realized the one God, who in Himself is formless, and expressible as to positive essence by nothing that is mundane and finite. The sublime presupposes the meaning, the import, the substance, in such selfdependency, that, as opposed to it, the outer body must appear as only in subjection, so far as the inner meaning is not present in it, but so transcends, surpasses, and goes beyond it, that just nothing but this transcending and surpassing enters into the representation.

In the symbol proper the form was the main point. It was such that it had an import or meaning, but yet was not in a position fully to express it. To the symbol again, as we may suppose it in the case of the sublime, and to all the unmeaning material it may bring

with it, there stands opposed now the import as such, in its clear intelligibleness, and the work of art becomes now the fusion of the pure substantial being as import of all things. This substantial being, further, must be understood to explicate and exhibit the inadequacy of form and import (which existed in the symbol only potentially as the import of God Himself, who, in the mundane, is transcendent over all mundane, and so rises to sublimity in the work of art here that has nothing to express but this absolutely manifest import. If we may call, then, the symbolical in general the sacred art, so far as it selects the divine for its object, it is the sublime which must be named the sacred art as such and exclusively, for it is to God alone it gives the honour.

The aim here is, on the whole, more limited than in the symbol proper, which, being but striving to the spiritual, exhibits a vast variety of transformations of the spiritual into forms of nature, and of the natural into assonances to spirit.

This form of the sublime we find in its primitive character, especially in the Jewish phantasy and its sacred poetry. For plastic art cannot appear here where there is no possibility of projecting any competent image of God, but only the poetry of pictorial conception which utters itself in words.

The more particular consideration of this stadium brings forward the following general points of view :

1. This poetry has, for its most general matter, God as Lord of the subservient world; not as incarnated in the external, but as withdrawn from mundane things into solitary unity within Himself. What, in the symbolical proper, was yet bound together, divides here, consequently, into the two sides of God's abstract selfness, and the world's

concrete existence.

a. God Himself, as this pure selfness of the one substance, is without form within Himself, and, taken in this abstraction, is insusceptible of any closer realization to the imagination. What,

then, the phantasy can grasp here, is not the divine nature in its pure essence: God Himself forbids that He be exhibited by art in any adequate form. The only thing tangible that remains is the relation of God to the world He has created.

b. God is the Creator of the universe. This is the purest expression of sublimity itself. For the first time now all conceptions of generation and mere natural origin of things out of God disappear, and give place to the thought of creation through spiritual power and agency. "God said, Let there be light, and there was light." This is adduced even by Longinus as an eminently striking example of the sublime. The Lord, the one substance, proceeds indeed. to utterance of Himself; but the mode of utterance is the purest: it is the bodiless, etherial utterance, the word, the utterance of thought as the ideal power, with whose command to exist, existence, in dumb obedience, immediately rose.

c. God passes not into the created world, however, as if into His reality, but remains withdrawn into Himself, without giving rise through this overagainst to any fixed dualism. For what is produced is His work, that, opposed to Him, is without self-substantiality, and is there only as proof of His wisdom, goodness, and righteousness. The One is Lord over all, and has in the things of nature not properly His presence, but only powerless accidents that can allow the Essence itself only to shine in them, but not appear. This constitutes the sublime on the part of God.

2. But now, on the one hand, the one God being in this manner separated from the concrete world of things and placed independent by Himself, while the externally existent, on the other hand, is determined and subordinated as the finite, the new position arises as well to natural as to human existence that it can be a representation of the divine only by its finitude being made prominent.

a. For the first time now, then, nature and the human shape lie before No. 96.-VOL. XVI.

us de-deified and prosaic. The Greeks relate that, as the heroes of the Argonautic expedition sailed through the Straits of the Hellespont, the rocks, which had hitherto opened and shut, and clashed together like shears, suddenly stood fast for ever, rooted in the ground. A like solidification of the finite in its intelligible definiteness, as opposed to the Infinite Essence, we find in the sacred poetry of the sublime, while in the symbolical, on the contrary, nothing preserves its right place, but the finite turns into the divine, which again abandons itself for the finite. Let us leave, for example, the old Indian poems for the Old Testament, and we find ourselves at once on quite another soil, which, however strange and different from our own its conditions, events, actions, and characters may be, still readily allows us to become at home in it. From a world of tumult and confusion we come into relations and find figures before us which appear quite natural, and whose fixed patriarchal characters in their definiteness and truth stand familiarly beside us as perfectly intelligible.

b. For this mode of view, which can apprehend the natural course of things and give validity to the laws of nature, miracles receive now also, for the first time, their place. In the Indian way, everything is a miracle, and so nothing is any longer miraculous. Where, in fact, the intelligible connexion of things is perpetually interrupted, where all is torn and contorted from its place, there is no room for miracles. For the miraculous presupposes an intelligible sequence as well as the usual clear consciousness which only calls miracle an interruption at the fiat of supernatural power of this customary connexion. Any specially specific expression of sublimity such miracles are, however, not; for the usual course of nature, equally with its interruption, follows only from the will of God and the submission of nature.

c. The special sublime, on the contrary, we must seek in this, that the entire created universe becomes mani

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fested as finite, limited, not self-maintaining and supporting, and can for this reason be regarded only as glorifying accessory for the praise of God.

3. In this acknowledgment of the nullity of things and in the exalting and extolling of God, it is that on this stadium the human individual seeks his own honour, his trust, and his satisfaction.

a. In this reference the Psalms supply us with classical examples of genuine sublimity, established as a model for all time; in which what man has before him in his religious conception of God is magnificently expressed with the mightiest uplifting of the soul. Nothing in the world durst pretend to independency, for all is and subsists only through the power of God, and for no other purpose than to minister to the glory of this power, as well as to declare its own substanceless nullity. As, therefore, we found in the phantasy of substantiality and its pantheism an infinite expansion, so we have to admire here the power of the exaltation of the soul which lets all go in order to announce the sole might of God. Especially, in this respect, is the 104th Psalm of majestic power: "Who coverest "Thyself with light as with a gar66 ment; who stretchest out the heavens "like a curtain," &c. Light, heaven, clouds, the wings of the wind, are here nothing in and for themselves; they are only an outer garment, a chariot, a messenger for the service of God. Further then the wisdom of God is extolled, which has set all things in order; the springs which rise in the valleys, the waters which run among the hills, by which the birds of heaven sit and sing among the branches; the grass, the wine that maketh glad the heart of man, the cedars of Lebanon which the Lord hath planted; the sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, and that leviathan whom the Lord hath made to play therein. And what God has created, that He also preserves, but, "hidest Thou Thy face, they are troubled; "Thɔu takest away their breath, they die " and return to their dust." The 90th

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are like grass which groweth up; in the "evening it is cut down, and withereth. "For we are consumed by Thine anger, " and by Thy wrath are we troubled."

b. There is thus connected with the sublime on the part of man the feeling at the same time of his own finitude and insurmountable separation from God.

a. The idea of the immortality, therefore, does not originally come forward in this sphere, for that idea involves the presupposition that the individual self, the soul, the human spirit, is an absolute existence. In the sublime, only the One is regarded as imperishable, and all else as coming and going, but not as free and infinite within itself.

B. So man regards himself here as in his worthlessness before God; his rising up takes place in the fear of the Lord, in the trembling before His wrath; and we find depicted in a penetrating and moving manner the grief over his own nothingness, and in lamentation, and suffering, and sorrow, out of the depths of the breast, hear the crying of the soul to God.

7. Should, on the other hand, the individual in his finitude maintain himself against God, then this wilful and intentional finitude is the Bad, that as evil and sin attaches only to nature and humanity, but in the One undivided substance can just as little have any place as pain and the negative in general.

c. Thirdly, nevertheless, man acquires within this nothingness a freer and more independent position. For, on the one hand, there arises for man from the substantial repose and stability of God, in reference to His will and the prescripts of His will, the Law; and on the other hand there lies at the same time in the exaltation that is present the complete clear distinction of the human from the divine, of the finite from the absolute, so that the judg

ment concerning good and bad, and the decision for the one or the other, is transferred into the subject himself. The relation to the absolute, and the adequacy or inadequacy of man to this absolute, has, therefore, a side as well which falls to the province of the individual and his own action and conconduct. Thereby, at the same time, this individual, in his right-doing and

obedience to the laws, finds an affirmative relation to God, and has in general to bring the external positive or negative condition of his existence,-wellbeing, enjoyment, satisfaction, or pain, unhappiness, oppression,-into connexion with his inner obedience or with his refractoriness to the law, and to accept the one or the other as benefit and reward, or as trial and punishment.

EVENINGS AT HOME.

SHUTTERS are barred; the wintry wind without
Blusters and howls; hear'st thou the trees about
Creak, and the sighing branches, and the panes
Dashed with the rattling rains?

The cosier we two, darling, by this fire

The green-clothed table midmost, spread with books;
The household settled all to thy desire,

And we ourselves to interchange of looks:

Thou, crimson-bodiced, in thy cushioned chair,

Thy fingers toying with some feminine work;

I on the sofa opposite thee, where,

Slippered at ease, and loose-gowned like a Turk,
I bask in presence of my golden girl,

Yet stint not to upwhirl

So tolerant her care

The short white puffs of smoke that snake the ruddy air.

How, seated so, my darling, we do chat

Of this and that

Our doings through the day, and what

We have seen, and whom; plans of the instant week;

Whether our purse

Grows healthier or worse;

This outlay, should we make or grudge it;

Topics on which to hear thee speak

Is better than any Budget!

Whence still we sweep

A wider deep

All news of nations and of distant seas;

How the great world goes round,

And who alive are noblest found

In every walk of men and all degrees.

Nor living only! All the ages past,

The plains that shroud the innumerable dead,
Yield us high objects-shapes of acts that last,
And portraitures of many a laurelled head:
Poets of glorious song,

Kings that have greatly wrought,

Great popular wrestlers against tyrannous wrong,
And others, few, who have but greatly thought
How spirits should be moved ;-
Yet ever, to our seeming,

These blended groups among,

The white arms wildly gleaming,
And the red hearts hotly scheming,

Of unnamed women who have greatly loved.
In heaven or earth

Is nothing not appropriate to our hearth.

Ah! in such colloquies how I came to know The mind that mine had wedded, and to grow Ever more amorous of it, the more

I knew its supple richness! As, of yore,

Some gymnast, wrestling with a splendid Spartan girl, The closer she did come and dare his press,

Must more and more have felt a giddiness

Flow from her touches, and such sensuous whirl
That either he must yield to her, and fall,
Assailed all round with hisses,

Or bear her bodily up, his lissome thrall,
And laugh, and run with her, and leap a wall,
And punish her with kisses:

So with us two-her mind, in its dear sex,
The utmost match of mine and innermost reflex.
I move, and she moves check: I thunder; lo!
A flash back from her battery if I say

Some sly thing meant for wit,

She catches it in air, and will remit

The message twirled in such a dexterous way
That I am hit.

But chief, through all, the ever-fresh surprise

That one so stoutly frank should be so subtly wise. She is, I swear, the most downright

Of living little Saxons-out of sight

An honester than I-quilted most thick
Against all sophistry, or whine, or trick;
Yet what superb agility

In every thoughtful gesture! What facility
In apprehensions the most intricate!

What readiness, on any beckoning from me,
Either to speculate

Questions of deep debate,

Or to luxuriate

In any field of floweriest phantasy!

No boldest phrase,

Brave girl, could thee amaze.

Dared I my utmost, and would try to wing
The Empyrean round the world we know,
Then, through that blaze of radiance voyaging,
And in the billowings of its boundless glow
Almost forgetting thee, the dear last thing
Left i' the dark orb human-turning, I descried
Thee, thee, my undaunted, winging to my side.

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