The doctor tells us in his Botanic Garden, p. 115, that there is a “line of boundary between the tragic and the horrid; which line, however, will veer a little this way or that, according to the prevailing manners of the age or country, and the peculiar association of ideas, or idiosyncrasy of mind, of individuals.”
Now I am apprehensive that doctor Darwin would have adjudged the greater part of Mr Southey’s sublimity to be of the “horrid” rather than the tragic or sublime kind. Such an opinion, however, would not only greatly tarnish the reputation of the critic who should venture to pronounce it, but would entirely put down many pretty good poets, who, as the Edinburgh reviewers say, must have a “qu’il mourut,” and a “let there be light” in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstacies, from their entrance to their exit.[G]
Thalaba, having leaped into a “little car” which appears to have been drawn by “four living pinions, headless, bodyless, sprung from one stem that branched below, in four down arching limbs, and clenched the carrings endlong and aside, with claws of griffin grasp;”
“Down—down, it sank—down—down—
Down—down—a mighty depth!—
Down—down—and now it strikes.”
There’s the bathos to perfection! Now, if we could in any way have prevailed on Mr Southey to have stopped this side of the centre of gravity, we should have been happy to have hired his “car” for this our dreadful rencontre. But as it appears that the Domdaniel cave soon after fell in, I fancy it would cost more to dig out this vehicle than to get Mr Southey to make us a new one.
Adown through vast Domdaniel cares.
That is, as Southey says, through the Domdaniel caves, “at the roots of the ocean.”