This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality: for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue: but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot reascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot, without a violent effort, picture to itself.
In our author’s account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton’s description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates.
‘Thrice howl’d the caves of night, and thrice the sound,
Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes,
Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound:
At last her listening ears the noise o’ertakes,
She lifts her sooty lamps, and looking round,
A general hiss,[[37]] from the whole tire of snakes
Rebounding through hell’s inmost caverns came,
In answer to her formidable name.