By the term parts we are not to be understood as including the minutiae of dress or ornament, or even the several members of a group, which come more properly under the head of detail; we apply the term only to those prominent divisions which constitute the essential features of a composition.  Of these the Sublime admits the fewest.  Nor is the limitation arbitrary.  By whatever causes the stronger passions or higher faculties of the mind become pleasurably excited, if they be pushed as it were beyond their supposed limits, till a sense of the indefinite seems almost to partake of the infinite, to these causes we affix the epithet Sublime. It is needless to inquire if such an effect can be produced by any thing short of the vast and overpowering, much less by the gradual approach or successive accumulation of any number of separate forces.  Every one can answer from his own experience.  We may also add, that the pleasure which belongs to the deeper emotions always trenches on pain; and the sense of pain leads to reaction; so that, singly roused, they will rise but to fall, like men at a breach,—­leaving a conquest, not over the living, but the dead.  The effect of the Sublime must therefore be sudden, and to be sudden, simple, scarce seen till felt; coming like a blast, bending and levelling every thing before it, till it passes into space.  So comes this marvellous emotion; and so vanishes,—­to where no straining of our mortal faculties will ever carry them.

To prevent misapprehension, we may here observe, that, though the parts be few, it does not necessarily follow that they should always consist of simple or single objects.  This narrow inference has often led to the error of mistaking mere space for grandeur, especially with those who have wrought rather from theory than from the true possession of their subjects.  Hence, by the mechanical arrangement of certain large and sweeping masses of light and shadow, we are sometimes surprised into a momentary expectation of a sublime impression, when a nearer approach gives us only the notion of a vast blank.  And the error lies in the misconception of a mass.  For a mass is not a thing, but the condition of things; into which, should the subject require it, a legion, a host, may be compressed, an army with banners,—­yet so that they break not the unity of their Part, that technic form to which they are subordinate.

The difference between a Part and a Mass is, that a Mass may include, per se, many Parts, yet, in relation to a Whole, is no more than a single component.  Perhaps the same distinction may be more simply expressed, if we define it as only a larger division, including several parts, which may be said to be analogous to what is termed the detail of a Part.  Look at the ocean in a storm,—­at that single wave.  How it grows before us, building up its waters as with conscious life, till its huge head overlooks the mast!  A million of lines intersect