...and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration....writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. Their attempts were...

...underlies the discussion of the metaphysical poets. Johnson objects to their failure to reach the sublime. "Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness...and in descriptions not descending to minuteness." " We find this criterion again and again: Butler's Hudibras cannot last, because it is full of allusions...

...commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. . . . Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness...and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. . . . Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; for great...

...metaphoric. A typical and characteristic expression of his position may be found in his "Life of Cowley": "Great thoughts are always general, and consist in...and in descriptions not descending to minuteness.""' He tells Boswell, "he always laboured when he said a good thing" (3: 260, 5: 77), by which he sometimes...

...and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration....subtlety, which in its original import means exility [ie, thinness, meagreness] of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction....

...apprenticeship to the picturesque emphasis on pictorial accuracy, now tended towards Dr Johnson's opinion that: "Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness...exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness."36 So he rewrites Descriptive Sketches in the sixth book of the 1805 Prelude; in the eleventh,...

...often an individual, in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.« 36. Lives, I (Cowley), 21: »Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness...and in descriptions not descending to minuteness.« 37. ebenda, / (Butler), 213—14; / (Cowley), 46; Raleigh, S. 158—9. 3 8. ebenda, j (Gray), 441:...

...and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtilty, whichin its original import means exility of particles, is...writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness ; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. Their attempts...