You can no more define grace than you can happiness.  The mind cannot so stedfastly behold it as to investigate its real properties.  Grace is indeed the point of happiness in the ideal region, both because it arises spontaneously, without effort, &c. and because it seems partly within our own power, and partly without it.

As common sense, in my fundamental circle, seems diffusive truth, so grace, in my ideal circle, seems diffusive sublimity; every perception of the former seems to be tinged, as it were, with the colour of the latter.

Section 4. Sublimity.

Where pure grace ends, the awe of the sublime begins, composed of the influence of pain, of pleasure, of grace, and deformity, playing into each other, that the mind is unable to determine which to call it, pain, pleasure, or terror.  Without a conjunction of these powers there could be no sublimity.

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.