What can be finer in any poet than that beautiful passage in Milton--
----Onward he moved And thousands of his saints around.
This is grandeur, but it is grandeur without completeness: but he adds--
which is the highest sublime. There is _total_ completeness.
So I would say that the Saviour praying on the Mountain, the Desert on one hand, the Sea on the other, the city at an immense distance below, was sublime. But I should say of the Saviour looking towards the City, his countenance full of pity, that he was majestic, and of the situation that it was grand.
When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multiety, there results shapeliness--_forma formosa_. Where the perfection of _form_ is combined with pleasurableness in the sensations, excited by the matters or substances so formed, there results the Beautiful.
_Corollary._--Hence colour is eminently subservient to beauty, because it is susceptible of forms, _i.e._ outline, and yet is a sensation. But a rich mass of scarlet clouds, seen without any attention to the _form_ of the mass or of the parts, may be a _delightful_ but not a beautiful object or colour.
When there is a deficiency of unity in the line forming the whole (as angularity, for instance), and of number in the plurality or the parts, there arises the Formal.
When the parts are numerous, and impressive, and predominate, so as to prevent or greatly lessen the attention to the whole, there results the Grand.
Where the impression of the whole, _i.e._ the sense of unity predominates, so as to abstract the mind from the parts--the Majestic.
Where the parts by their harmony produce an effect of a whole, but there is no seen form of a whole producing or explaining the parts, _i.e._ when the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt--the Picturesque.
Where neither whole nor parts, but unity, as boundless or endless _allness_--the Sublime.
It often amuses me to hear men impute all their misfortunes to fate, luck, or destiny, whilst their successes or good fortune they ascribe to their own sagacity, cleverness, or penetration. It never occurs to such minds that light and darkness are one and the same, emanating from, and being part of, the same nature.