reverence came over me as I passed on. Yes, do not laugh. It was really reverence I felt before that little heroic bird and the passionate outburst of its love. Love, I thought, is verily stronger than death and the terror of death. By love, only by love, is life sustained and moved. This sparrow, it will be agreed, is sublime. What, then, makes it so? Not largeness of size, assuredly, but, we answer, its love and courage. Yes; but what do we mean by ‘its love and courage’? We often meet with love and courage, and always admire and approve them; but we do not always find them sublime. Why, then, are they sublime in the sparrow? From their extraordinary greatness. It is not in the quality alone, but in the quantity of the quality, that the sublimity lies. And this may be readily seen if we imagine the quantity to be considerably reduced,—if we imagine the parent bird, after its first brave effort, flinching and flying 45 away, or if we suppose the bird that sacrifices itself to be no sparrow but a turkey. In either case love and courage would remain, but sublimity would recede or vanish, simply because the love and courage would no longer possess the required immensity.4 45 4 The sublimity of the sparrow, then, no less than that of the sky or sea, depends on exceeding or overwhelming greatness—a greatness, however, not of extension but rather of strength or power, and in this case of spiritual power. ‘Love is stronger than death,’ quotes the poet; ‘a power stronger than its own tore it away.’ So it is with the dog of whom Scott and Wordsworth sang, whose master had perished among the crags of Helvellyn, and who was found three months after by his master’s body, How nourished here through such long time He knows who gave that love sublime, And gave that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate.5 5 And if we look further we shall find that these cases of sublimity are, in this respect, far from being exceptions: ‘thy soul’s immensity,’ says Wordsworth to the child; ‘mighty prophet’ he calls it. We shall find, in fact, that in the sublime, when there is not greatness of extent, there is another greatness, which (without saying that the phrase is invariably the most appropriate) we may call greatness of power
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