A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself?  This is owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror.  Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.  Several languages bear a strong testimony to the affinity of these ideas.  They frequently use the same word to signify indifferently the modes of astonishment or admiration and those of terror. [Greek:  Thambos] is in Greek either fear or wonder; [Greek:  deinos] is terrible or respectable; [Greek:  ahideo], to reverence or to fear. Vereor in Latin is what [Greek:  ahideo] is in Greek.  The Romans used the verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple fear, or of astonishment; the word attonitus (thunderstruck) is equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do not the French etonnement, and the English astonishment and amazement, point out as clearly the kindred emotions which attend fear and wonder?  They who have a more general knowledge of languages, could produce, I make no doubt, many other and equally striking examples.

SECTION III.

OBSCURITY.

To make anything very terrible, obscurity[13] seems in general to be necessary.  When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.  Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings.  Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye.  The policy has been the same in many cases of religion.  Almost all the heathen temples were dark.  Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship.  For this purpose too the Druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks.  No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton.  His description of death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and coloring, he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors: