What is the Sublime?

For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for  presenting  the  idea  of  a  whole  within  which  that  imagination attains  its  maximum,  and,  in  its  fruitless  efforts  to  extend  this  limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

When we see the sublime, it elevates the soul, gives her a higher opinion of herself, and fills her with joy, and a noble kind of pride, as if herself had produced what she is admiring.

For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

What are men compared to rocks and mountains?