Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/274

244 vision, let me add that imaginative genius can force Compulsion of the Vague. us to recognize the wonder, terror, and sublimity of the Vague. Through its suggested power we are withdrawn from the firm-set world, and feel what it is

 "to be a mortal And seek the things beyond mortality."

What lies beyond, in the terra incognita from which we are barred as from the polar spaces guarded by arctic and antarctic barriers, can only be suggested by formlessness, extension, imposing shadow, and phantasmal light. The early Hebraic expression of its mysteries will never be surpassed. Nothing in even the culminating vision of the Apocalypse so takes hold of us as the ancient words of Eliphaz, in the Book of Job, describing the fear that came upon him in the night, when deep sleep falleth on man:

English poetry doubly inherits the sublimity of Camoëns, Milton, Coleridge. the vague, from its Oriental and its Gothic strains. Yet it has produced few images more striking than that one which lifts the "Lusiad," by Camoëns, above the level of a perfunctory epic. Vasco da Gama and his crew are struggling to pass