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Show 102 ORIGIN OF SOCIETY. CANTO II I. Fond Fancy's .eye recalls the fonn divine, And TASTE sits smiling upon Beauty's shrine. " Where Egypt's pyramids gigantic stand, And stretch their shadows o'er the shuddering sand; Or where high rocks o'er ocean's dashing floods Wave high in air their panoply of woods; Admiring TAsTE delights to stray beneath With eye uplifted, and forgets to breathe; Or, as aloft his daring footsteps climb, Crests their high summits with his arm sublin1e. 230 ·we find, according to the ingenious idea of Hogarth, that the waving lines of beauty were originally taken from the temple of Venus. With his arm sublime, 1. 230. Objects of taste have been generally divided into the beautiful, the sublime, and the new; and lately to these nave been added the picturesque. The beautiful so well explained in Hogarth's analysis of beauty, consists of curved lines and smooth surfaces, as expressed in the preceding note; any object larger than usual, as a very large temple or a very large mountain, gives us the idea of sublimity; with which is often confounded the terrific, and the melancholic: what is now termed picturesque includes objects, which are principally neither sublime nor beautiful, but which by their variety and intricacy joined with a due degree of regularity or uniformity convey to the mind an aareeable sentiment . 0 of novelty. lVIany other agreeable sentiments may be excited by vi-sible objects; thus to the sublime and beautiful may be added the CANTO III. PROGRESS OF THE MIND. 103 '' Wheremouldering columns mark the lingering wreck Of Thebes, Palmyra, Baby Ion, Balbec; The prostrate obelisk, or shatter' d dome ' Uprooted pedestal, and yawning tomb, On loitering steps reflective TASTE surveys With folded arms and sympathetic gaze; Charm'd with poetic Melancholy treads O'er ruin'd towns and desolated meads· . ' Or rides subli1.ne on Time's expanded wings,_ And views the fate of ever-changing things. 240 " When Beauty's streaming eyes her woes express, Or Virtue braves unmerited distress; terrific, tragic, melancholic, artless, &c. while novelty saperinduces a charm upon them all. See Additional Note XIII. Poetic melancholy treads, 1. 237. The pleasure arisin o· from the contemplation of the ruin.s of ancient grandeur or of ancient happinesf-1, and here termed poetlc mela11choly, arises from a combination of the painful idea of sorrow with the pleasurable idea of the oTandeur or happiness of past times; and becomes very interestino· to ~s by fixino· . 0 0 our attentiOn more strongly on that oTimdeur and happiness as the . 0 ' passiOn of Pity mentioned in the succeeding note is a combination of tl~e painful idea of sorrow with the pleasurable one of beauty, or of VIrtue. |